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Systems Ultra: Making Sense of Technology in a Complex World
By Georgina Voss. 2024
A TOOLBOX FOR COMPREHENDING — AND CHANGING — THE WORLDSystems Ultra explores how we experience complex systems: the mesh of…
things, people, and ideas interacting to produce their own patterns and behaviours.What does it mean when a car which runs on code drives dangerously? What does massmarket graphics software tell us about the workplace politics of architects? And, in these human-made systems, which phenomena are designed, and which are emergent? In a world of networked technologies, global supply chains, and supranational regulations, there are growing calls for a new kind of literacy around systems and their ramifications. At the same time, we are often told these systems are impossible to fully comprehend and are far beyond our control.Drawing on field research and artistic practice around the industrial settings of ports, air traffic control, architectural software, payment platforms in adult entertainment, and car crash testing, Georgina Voss argues that complex systems can be approached as sites of revelation around scale, time, materiality, deviance, and breakages. With humour and guile, she tells the story of what &‘systems&’ have come to mean, how they have been sold to us, and the real-world consequences of the power that flows through them.Systems Ultra goes beyond narratives of technological exceptionalism to explore how we experience the complex systems which influence our lives, how to understand them more clearly, and, perhaps, how to change them.British Foreign Policy in former Yugoslavia 1989–1999: Brotherhood and Unity Lost
By John P McCumiskey. 2023
British Foreign Policy in former Yugoslavia 1989-1999: Brotherhood and Unity Lost, gives a broad analysis of Britain’s foreign policy during…
the wars of Yugoslav secessions from 1992 to 1999. Normative approaches to Britain’s foreign policy during this period ‘have tended to place it’ in to two halves. The notion, there was a new morality in Britain’s foreign policy appeared after New Labour‘s election landslide on 1 May 1997. Robin Cook declared shortly after the victory there would be an ‘ethical dimension’ to Labour‘s foreign policy, and this appeared to chart new territory. As a result, this would be a departure from what former US Assistant Secretary of State, James Rubin, believed was the hyper-realism of the traditional British kind under British Prime Minister, John Major. The book includes interviews with key actors, provides new archive material and re-examines claims by the ‘New Orthodoxy’ which became prevalent after 1999.&“Poignant, funny, and able to provide exercises that help you maneuver the rough . . . if I were going through…
something, this is the book I want to read.&” —Gayle KingStay connected to your person, yourself, and the world around you in the aftermath of loss. Modern Loss is all about eradicating the stigma and awkwardness around grief while also focusing on our capacity for resilience and finding meaning. In this interactive guide, Modern Loss cofounder Rebecca Soffer offers candid, practical, and witty advice for confronting a future without your person, honoring their memory, dealing with trigger days, managing your professional life, and navigating new and existing relationships. You&’ll find no worn-out platitudes or empty assurances here. With prompts, creative projects, innovative rituals, therapeutic-based exercises, and more, this is the place to explore the messy, long arc of loss on your own timeline—and without judgment.School Moms: Parent Activism, Partisan Politics, and the Battle for Public Education
By Laura Pappano. 2024
An on-the-ground look at the rise of parent activism in response to the far-right attacks on public school educationFor well…
over a century, public schools have been a non-partisan gathering place and vital center of civic life in America--but something has changed. In School Moms, journalist Laura Pappano explores the on-the-ground story of how public schools across the country have become ground zero in a cultural and political war as the far-right have made efforts to seek power over school boards.Pappano argues that the rise of parent activism is actually the culmination of efforts that began in the 1990s after campaigns to stop sex education largely fizzled. Recent efforts to make public schools more responsive and inclusive, as well as the pandemic, have offered openings the far-right have been waiting for to organize and sway parents, who are frustrated and exhausted by remote learning, objections by teacher&’s unions, and shifting directives from school leaders. Groups like Moms for Liberty and Parents Defending Education are organizing against revised history curricula they have dubbed as "CRT," banning books, pressing for "Don't Say Gay" laws, and asserting "parental rights" to gain control over the review of classroom materials. On the other side, progressive groups like Support Our Schools and Red, Wine & Blue are mobilizing parents to counter such moves.Combining on-the-ground reporting with research and expert interviews, School Moms will take a hard look at where these battles are happening, what is at stake, and why it matters for the future of our schools.Transformations of European Welfare States and Social Rights: Regulation, Professionals, and Citizens (Palgrave Socio-Legal Studies)
By Stine Piilgaard Porner Nielsen, Ole Hammerslev. 2024
This open access edited book investigates European social rights in practice from socio-legal perspectives. It brings together fourteen socio-legal scholars,…
representing Nordic and Western European countries, who analyse different aspects pertaining to European social rights, namely the regulation of social rights, encounters between welfare professionals and citizens, and citizens’ mobilisation of social rights. These three different aspects from the structure for the sections in the anthology, each analysing transformations related to regulation, encounters and rights mobilisation. The book contributes to the existing literature as it focuses on interdependent transformations on macro, meso and micro levels which are key for understanding processes and contexts related to European social rights in practice. It speaks particularly to academics in sociology of law and/or regulation.Vereinbarkeit und Schwangerschaft: Psychische Belastung durch Antizipation? (essentials)
By Okka Zimmermann, Lina Kolonko. 2023
Schwangerschaft sowie Vereinbarkeit von Beruf und Familie werden in der Soziologie in den letzten Dekaden verstärkt sozialwissenschaftlich erforscht, bisher jedoch…
nicht zusammengebracht. Die Studie arbeitet daher heraus, dass bereits in und vor der Schwangerschaft die grundlegenden Weichenstellungen für Vereinbarkeit gestellt und verhandelt werden; dabei kann die Antizipation von Problemen und Konflikten eine große psychische Belastung darstellen.Authoritarian Populism and Bovine Political Economy in Modi’s India (Routledge Studies in South Asian Politics)
By Jostein Jakobsen, Kenneth Bo Nielsen. 2024
Authoritarian Populism and Bovine Political Economy in Modi’s India analyses how the twin forces of Hindu nationalism and neoliberalism unfold…
in India’s bovine economy, revealing their often-devastating material and economic impact on the country’s poor.This book is a rare, in-depth study of India’s bovine economy under Narendra Modi’s authoritarian populism. This is an economy that throws up a central paradox: On the one hand, an entrenched and aggressive Hindu nationalist politics is engaged in violently protecting the cow, disciplining those who do not sufficiently respect and revere it; on the other hand, India houses and continuously promotes one of the world’s largest corporate-controlled beef export economies that depends on the slaughter of millions of bovines every year. The book offers an original analysis of this scenario to show how Modi’s authoritarian populist regime has worked to reconcile the two by simultaneously promoting a virulent Hindu nationalism that seeks to turn India into a Hindu state, while also pushing neoliberal economic policies favouring corporate capital and elite class interests within and beyond the bovine economy.The book brings out the adverse impacts of these political-economic processes on the lives and livelihoods of millions of poor Indians in countryside and city. In addition, it identifies emerging weaknesses in Modi’s authoritarian populism, highlighting the potential for progressive counter-mobilisation. It will be of interest to scholars in the fields of development studies, South Asia studies, critical agrarian studies, as well as scholars with a general interest in political economy, contemporary authoritarian populism, and social movements.The State and Revolution
By V. I. Lenin. 2024
Lenin's most important and controversial theoretical textLenin&’s booklet The State and Revolution struck the world of Marxist theory like a…
lightning bolt. Written in the months running up to the October Revolution of 1917, Lenin turned the traditional socialist concept of the state on its head, arguing for the need to smash the organs of the bourgeois state to create a &‘semi-state&’ of soviets, or workers&’ councils, in which ordinary people would take on the functions of the state machine in a new and radically democratic manner.This new edition includes a substantial introduction by renowned theorist Antonio Negri, who argues for the continued relevance of these ideas.Jakob Graf wirft in diesem Open-Access-Buch die Frage auf, wie sozialökologische Konflikte am Rande der Weltwirtschaft soziologisch verstanden werden können.…
Dabei zeigt er, dass gerade in durch Rohstoffausbeutung gekennzeichneten Ländern des Globalen Südens große Teile der Erwerbstätigen nicht mittels Lohnarbeit in den globalen Kapitalismus integriert werden. Aus Sicht der kapitalistischen Weltwirtschaft sind große Teile der weltweiten Armen vielmehr „überflüssig“. Der Autor zeigt, dass diese Menschen allerdings nicht einfach „arbeitslos“, sondern vielfach wirtschaftlich aktiv sind; sie tragen in entscheidendem Maße zum Überleben der Menschen in ärmeren Ländern bei. Wie aus dem Widerspruch zwischen diesen lokalen „bedarfsökonomischen“ Aktivitäten und der kapitalistischen Wirtschaft sozialökologische Konflikte entstehen, verdeutlicht Graf am Beispiel der indigenen Mapuche im Süden Chiles. Diese setzen sich gegen die Expansion der industriellen Forstwirtschaft zur Wehr, die für die Weltmärkte in riesigen Forstplantagen Zellstoff produziert. Als historisch "Enteignete" kämpfen die Mapuche für die Wiederaneignung ihres Landes und ihrer Ressourcen. Graf analysiert die Funktionsweise derartiger Konflikte, er fragt, wie sich die soziale Gruppe der „Überflüssigen“ soziologisch verstehen lässt.Demystifying Power, Crime and Social Harm: The Work and Legacy of Steven Box (Critical Criminological Perspectives)
By David Gordon Scott, Joe Sim. 2023
This collection revisits Steven Box’s book, Power, Crime and Mystification, published in 1983, and considers its relevance forty years on.…
It introduces the critical analysis developed by Box which examined corporate crime, police crime, rape and sexual assault and female crime and analyses the continuities and discontinuities since 1983 in relation to crime, the state and the exercise/mystification of power. The book explores the ways in which we can see his influence nationally and internationally on critical criminological, zemiological and abolitionist writings today. It asks how can these perspectives be applied to a critical analysis of contemporary, state authoritarianism and the criminal injustice that this authoritarianism generates? Additionally, how can Box’s concepts shine a critical light on contemporary social harms that were not covered in the original book? The collection provides a toolkit for students and academics to critically analyse the issues around crime/social harm, power/powerlessness, truth/mystification, criminal injustice/social justice as well as historical and contemporary sites of resistance confronting the exercise of state power.Tourism and Biopolitics in Pandemic Times
By Maartje Roelofsen, Claudio Minca. 2023
This edited collection brings together interventions on the geographies of tourism in pandemic times approached from a biopolitical perspective. Whilst…
the “management of bodies” has always been a constitutive part of tourism and its spatialities, the COVID-19 pandemic has prompted the emergence of entirely new “states of exception” and emergency regimes, geared towards tight restrictions and control over the mobility and embodied practices of millions of travelers and tourists. Debates in tourism over the “politics of life”, now more than ever, ought to concern health and wellbeing for both individuals and selected populations, not in the least because tourism has provided in many instances the socio-spatial conditions for the virus to spread. This book intends to show how a biopolitical analytical framework may provide a set of insights and critical perspectives that are key to the understanding of contemporary tourism practices and regimes of mobility, security, and in/exclusion – particularly in relation to the COVID-19 pandemic.Crowded Orbits: Conflict and Cooperation in Space
By James Clay Moltz. 2024
Space has become increasingly crowded since the turn of the century, as a growing number of countries, companies, and even…
private citizens have begun operating satellites and become spacefarers. Crowded Orbits offers readers a valuable primer on space policy from an international perspective, examining technology, diplomacy, commerce, science, and military applications. This second edition is thoroughly updated to cover events of the decade following the book’s original publication in 2014, when the pace of the competition to exploit space has accelerated dramatically.James Clay Moltz examines the ongoing tension between competition and cooperation in space, tracing the geopolitical and policy consequences of key developments. Drawing on decades of experience, he considers possible avenues for collaboration among the growing number of actors as well as the forces driving potential space-related conflicts. Moltz examines the challenges to existing treaties and other governance mechanisms that have struggled to keep up with the spread of technology. He provides policy recommendations to enhance international collaboration, further scientific exploration, and restrain harmful military activities. This edition features analysis of a range of topics, including the ongoing commercialization of space by SpaceX, Planet, and other start-up companies; new capabilities to monitor Earth from space; renewed tensions between the United States and rivals China and Russia in military activities; and emerging multinational competition on the Moon.What We've Become: Living and Dying in a Country of Arms
By Jonathan M. Metzl. 2024
A searing reflection on the broken promise of safety in America. When a naked, mentally ill white man with an…
AR-15 killed four young adults of color at a Waffle House, Nashville-based physician and gun policy scholar Dr. Jonathan M. Metzl once again advocated for commonsense gun reform. But as he peeled back evidence surrounding the racially charged mass shooting, a shocking question emerged: Did the public health approach he had championed for years have it all wrong? Long at the forefront of a movement advocating for gun reform as a matter of public health, Metzl has been on constant media call in the aftermath of fatal shootings. But the 2018 Nashville killings led him on a path toward recognizing the limitations of biomedical frameworks for fully diagnosing or treating the impassioned complexities of American gun politics. As he came to understand it, public health is a harder sell in a nation that fundamentally disagrees about what it means to be safe, healthy, or free. In What We’ve Become, Metzl reckons both with the long history of distrust of public health and the larger forces—social, ideological, historical, racial, and political—that allow mass shootings to occur on a near daily basis in America. Looking closely at the cycle in which mass shootings lead to shock, horror, calls for action, and, ultimately, political gridlock, he explores what happens to the soul of a nation—and the meanings of safety and community—when we normalize violence as an acceptable trade-off for freedom. Mass shootings and our inability to stop them have become more than horrific crimes: they are an American national autobiography. This brilliant, piercing analysis points to mass shootings as a symptom of our most unresolved national conflicts. What We’ve Become ultimately sets us on the path of alliance forging, racial reckoning, and political power brokering we must take to put things right.Global Digital Data Governance: Polycentric Perspectives (Routledge Global Cooperation Series)
By Carolina Aguerre, Malcolm Campbell-Verduyn, Jan Aart Scholte. 2024
This book provides a nuanced exploration of contemporary digital data governance, highlighting the importance of cooperation across sectors and disciplines…
in order to adapt to a rapidly evolving technological landscape. Most of the theory around global digital data governance remains scattered and focused on specific actors, norms, processes, or disciplinary approaches. This book argues for a polycentric approach, allowing readers to consider the issue across multiple disciplines and scales. Polycentrism, this book argues, provides a set of lenses that tie together the variety of actors, issues, and processes intertwined in digital data governance at subnational, national, regional, and global levels. Firstly, this approach uncovers the complex array of power centers and connections in digital data governance. Secondly, polycentric perspectives bridge disciplinary divides, challenging assumptions and drawing together a growing range of insights about the complexities of digital data governance. Bringing together a wide range of case studies, this book draws out key insights and policy recommendations for how digital data governance occurs and how it might occur differently. Written by an international and interdisciplinary team, this book will be of interest to students and scholars in the field of development studies, political science, international relations, global studies, science and technology studies, sociology, and media and communication studies.Democracy and Time in Cuban Thought: The Elusive Present
By María De Torres. 2024
How the temporalities of past, future, and present have been used in Cuban political rhetoric and expressed in Cuban culture…
In this fascinating analysis of political discourse in Cuban culture, María de los Ángeles Torres focuses on how the concept of time has been employed by different political projects. While the past and future are often evoked in rhetoric associated with authoritarianism, Torres argues, an emphasis on human actions in the present is important for a more democratic political culture, and she searches over a century of Cuban thought for this perspective. Delving into political texts and essays, literature, and art, Torres puts theories of temporalities in conversation with the Cuban experience. Torres closely examines the use of time and its political implications in Fidel Castro’s “History Will Absolve Me” speech, the writings of Jose Martí and Che Guevara, the poetry of Eliseo Diego and the Orígenes group, and paintings and performance art by Cuban exiles Nereida García Ferraz, María Martínez-Cañas, and Tania Bruguera. Recent events in Cuba have placed the search for democracy and social justice center stage, and Torres also studies the temporalities underpinning these movements, asking whether these projects are providing alternatives to overused past and future tropes. She suggests ways of thinking for today’s activists, encouraging them to remember history and imagine new possibilities while cultivating space for human agency now. Publication of this work made possible by a Sustaining the Humanities through the American Rescue Plan grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.Waiting for the Cool Moon: Anti-imperialist Struggles in the Heart of Japan's Empire
By Wendy Matsumura. 2024
In Waiting for the Cool Moon Wendy Matsumura interrogates the erasure of colonial violence at the heart of Japanese nation-state…
formation. She critiques Japan studies’ role in this effacement and contends that the field must engage with anti-Blackness and anti-Indigeneity as the grounds on which to understand imperialism, colonialism, fascism, and other forces that shape national consciousness. Drawing on Black radical thinkers’ critique of the erasure of the Middle Passage in universalizing theories of modernity’s imbrication with fascism, Matsumura traces the consequences of the Japanese empire’s categorization of people as human and less-than-human as manifested in the 1920s and 1930s, and the struggles of racialized and colonized people against imperialist violence. She treats the archives safeguarded by racialized, colonized women throughout the empire as traces of these struggles, including the work they performed to keep certain stories out of view. Matsumura demonstrates that tracing colonial sensibility and struggle is central to grappling with their enduring consequences for the present.Standing His Ground: The Inside Story of Ron Desantis's Rise and Battle for Freedom
By Richard Corcoran. 2023
Contrary to what the mainstream media has claimed, Florida under Ron DeSantis has become the home for freedom and individual…
liberty.At the onset of the pandemic, political leaders throughout the country were forced to quickly make significant decisions about how they would govern under extraordinary circumstances. A number of these decisions simply required instinct—they just had to come from the gut. There was little, if any, precedent to examine, and hardly any time for the usual gambits to test potential solutions. One person became a household name and a national hero for having made what proved to be the best decisions over and over: Ron DeSantis, the 46th governor of Florida. However, not surprisingly, his success also begot wrath. A patriot to millions of everyday Americans is often a &“tyrant&” to progressive elites. Other than perhaps former President Donald Trump, DeSantis was and remains the most vilified elected official in media, politics, entertainment, academia, and now the corporate world. Conservatives know full well this means he hit the bullseye. Now that more than two years have passed, the American people are able to clearly see whose decisions struck the proper balance between liberty and safety. There&’s no denying that DeSantis&’s influence soared as the world watched him successfully steer his state step by step through one of the greatest periods of turmoil and uncertainty in modern history. While many other states floundered, Florida didn&’t just survive—it flourished.From the #1 New York Times–bestselling author of So You Want to Talk About Race and Mediocre, an eye-opening and…
galvanizing look at the current state of anti-racist activism across America. In the #1 New York Times bestseller So You Want To Talk About Race, Ijeoma Oluo offered a vital guide for how to talk about important issues of race and racism in society. In Mediocre: The Dangerous Legacy of White Male America, she discussed the ways in which white male supremacy has had an impact on our systems, our culture, and our lives throughout American history. But now that we better understand these systems of oppression, the question is this: What can we do about them?With Be A Revolution: How Everyday People are Fighting Oppression and Changing the World—and How You Can, Too, Oluo aims to show how people across America are working to create real positive change in our structures. Looking at many of our most powerful systems—like education, media, labor, health, housing, policing, and more—she highlights what people are doing to create change for intersectional racial equity. She also illustrates various ways in which the reader can find entryways into change in these same areas, or can bring some of this important work being done elsewhere to where they live.This book aims to not only be educational, but to inspire action and change. Oluo wishes to take our conversations on race and racism out of a place of pure pain and trauma, and into a place of loving action. Be A Revolution is both an urgent chronicle of this important moment in history, as well as an inspiring and restorative call for action.Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here: The United States, Central America, and the Making of a Crisis
By Jonathan Blitzer. 2024
Named a Most Anticipated Book of 2024 by Foreign Policy, Alta, and The Millions&“Extraordinary . . . a profound reflection on…
one of the great paradoxes of American life—and a tribute to the astonishing indomitability of the human spirit.&” —Patrick Radden Keefe &“A searing, gut-wrenching, and masterfully reported account.&” —Jill LeporeAn epic, heartbreaking, and deeply reported history of the disastrous humanitarian crisis at the southern border told through the lives of the migrants forced to risk everything and the policymakers who determine their fate, by New Yorker staff writer Jonathan BlitzerEveryone who makes the journey faces an impossible choice. Hundreds of thousands of people who arrive every year at the US-Mexico border travel far from their homes. An overwhelming share of them come from El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras, although many migrants come from farther away. Some are fleeing persecution, others crime or hunger. Very often it will not be their first attempt to cross. They may have already been deported from the United States, but it remains their only hope for safety and prosperity. Their homes have become uninhabitable. They will take their chances.This vast and unremitting crisis did not spring up overnight. Indeed, as Blitzer dramatizes with forensic, unprecedented reporting, it is the result of decades of misguided policy and sweeping corruption. Brilliantly weaving the stories of Central Americans whose lives have been devastated by chronic political conflict and violence with those of American activists, government officials, and the politicians responsible for the country&’s tragically tangled immigration policy, Blitzer reveals the full, layered picture for the first time.Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here is an odyssey of struggle and resilience. With astonishing nuance and detail, Blitzer tells an epic story about the people whose lives ebb and flow across the border, and in doing so, he delves into the heart of American life itself. This vital and remarkable story has shaped the nation&’s turbulent politics and culture in countless ways—and will almost certainly determine its future.Money in the Twenty-First Century: Cheap, Mobile, and Digital
By Prof. Richard Holden. 2024
An economist examines three modern forces that have redefined what "money" means, who controls it, and what the future of…
finance might look like. Money is increasingly cheap, digital, and mobile. In Money in the Twenty-First Century, economist Richard Holden examines the virtues and risks of low interest rates, mobile money, and cryptocurrencies, and explains how these three elemental forces will continue to play out—in our wallets, on the blockchain, and throughout major economies—in the decades to come. Holden weaves in the stories of three people who have exerted massive influence over the future of modern money: US treasury secretary Janet Yellen, Ethereum cofounder Vitalik Buterin, and Raghuram Rajan, former governor of the Reserve Bank of India and chief economist at the International Monetary Fund. Moving from micro to macro, Holden investigates the infrastructure that permits digital transactions, the currencies that underpin them, the race for control of those currencies, shifts in policy and the international monetary system, and the impact on our politics of money in the digital age. Ultimately, Money in the Twenty-First Century asks if governments can keep these three tectonic powers of low interest rates, mobile money, and decentralized finance under control.