Download or read book Threatening Dystopias written by Kasia Paprocki and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2021-12-15 with total page 271 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bangladesh is currently ranked as one of the most climate vulnerable countries in the world. In Threatening Dystopias, Kasia Paprocki investigates the politics of climate change adaptation throughout the South Asian nation. Drawing on ethnographic and archival fieldwork, she engages with developers, policy makers, scientists, farmers, and rural migrants to show how Bangladeshi and global elites ignore the history of landscape transformation and its attendant political conflicts. Paprocki looks at how groups craft economic narratives and strategies that redistribute power and resources away from peasant communities. Although these groups claim that increased production of export commodities will reframe the threat of climate change into an opportunity for economic development and growth, the reality is not so simple. For the country's rural poor, these promises ring hollow. As development dispossesses the poor from agrarian livelihoods, outmigration from peasant communities leads to precarious existences in urban centers. And a vision of development in which urbanization and export-led growth are both desirable and inevitable is not one the land and its people can sustain. Threatening Dystopias shows how a powerful rural movement, although hampered by an all-consuming climate emergency, is seeking climate justice in Bangladesh.

Download or read book Frontier Assemblages written by Jason Cons and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2019-02-26 with total page 286 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Frontier Assemblages offers a new framework for thinking about resource frontiers in Asia Presents an empirical understanding of resource frontiers and provides tools for broader engagements and linkages Filled with rich ethnographic and historical case studies and contains contributions from noted scholars in the field Explores the political ecology of extraction, expansion and production in marginal spaces in Asia Maps the flows, frictions, interests and imaginations that accumulate in Asia to transformative effect Brings together noted anthropologists, geographers and sociologists

Download or read book Dystopias of Infamy written by Javier Irigoyen-García and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 2022-07-15 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Insults, scorn, and verbal abuse—frequently deployed to affirm the social identity of the insulter—are destined to fail when that language is appropriated and embraced by the maligned group. In such circumstances, slander may instead empower and reinforce the collective identity of those perceived to be a threat to an idealized society. In this innovative study, Irigoyen-Garcia examines how the discourse and practices of insult and infamy shaped the cultural imagination, anxieties, and fantasies of early modern Spain. Drawing on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century literary works, archival research, religious and political literature, and iconographic documents, Dystopias of Infamy traces how the production of insults haunts the imaginary of power, provoking latent anxieties about individual and collective resistance to subjectification. Of particular note is Cervantes’s tendency to parody regulatory fantasies about infamy throughout his work, lampooning repressive law for its paradoxical potential to instigate the very defiance it fears.

Download or read book Nordic Utopias and Dystopias written by Pia Maria Ahlbäck and published by John Benjamins Publishing Company. This book was released on 2022-11-24 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Nordic countries have long been subject to certain idealised, even utopian imaginaries, particularly with regard to images of pristine nature and the societal ideals of democracy, equality and education. On the other hand, such projections inevitably invite dissent, irony and intimations of the utopia’s dark underside. Things may yet take, or may have already taken, a dystopic course. The present volume offers twelve contributions on utopias and dystopias in Nordic literature and culture. Geographically, the articles cover the Nordic countries of Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden, as well as the autonomous area of Greenland. Through the articles’ varied subjects — ranging from avant-garde literature and long poems to noir TV-series, young adult fiction, popular historiography, and political discourse in literature outside of Norden — the volume brings forth a historically rich, multi-layered picture of social, cultural and environmental imagination in the Nordic countries. Nordic Utopias and Dystopias is thus of interest not only to specialists in dystopian and utopian research but more broadly to scholars of literature and culture, and the political and social sciences, especially but not exclusively in the Nordic context.

Download or read book Making Globalization Happen written by Vijayashri Sripati and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2024-03-25 with total page 577 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Making Globalization Happen: The Untold Story of Power, Profits, Privilege, Sripati explains how, when, through which entities, and for what purposes economic globalization was catalyzed and its effects on the Global South in general and South Asia in particular. Based on an innovative international constitutional political economy framework, Sripati examines how the Western classical liberal constitution has shaped international law developments in this post-colonial era given its salience and comprehensive scope. Presenting a comprehensive narrative of economic globalization, Making Globalization Happen accurately and comprehensively links constitutional globalization to the following UN family-created agendas: peacebuilding, conflict prevention, human security, protection of civilians, sustainable development, global war on terrorism, women, peace, and security, poverty reduction or market-oriented development, ending conflict-related sexual violence, and justice (climate, criminal, and transitional). Sripati simultaneously provides the missing constitutional foundation for globalization and the fields that it has spawned: global studies and law and political economy. With these ground-breaking insights, Making Globalization Happen: The Untold Story of Power, Profits, Privilege clearly illustrates who drove constitutional globalization and for whose benefit: the UN family and transnational capitalists. Thus, it rips away the facade of UN family-driven peace, justice, human rights, democracy, and development to expose it as a narrative of power, profit, and privilege for transnational capitalists and debt, death, and despair for the Global South.

Download or read book Analysing Darkness and Light Dystopias and Beyond written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2023-08-28 with total page 222 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The book situates itself in the fields of philosophy, political theory, aesthetics and theories of art, linking its discussions of fictional dystopias to debates on ongoing crises. It asks: Are dystopias a useful tool for imagining ways out of sombre situations or do they prevent us from engaging in transformative action? The book consists of a thorough introduction and three major sections: 1. Dystopias of Meaninglessness, 2. Techno-Euphoria vs. Terror of Technology, and 3. Dystopias Come True? The individual chapters discuss, among other things, liberalism and conservatism, “luxury communism”, pandemics, technology-induced anxiety, empty speech, ethics, film, literature, architecture and music.

Download or read book War on Autism written by Anne McGuire and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2016-04-28 with total page 275 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: War on Autism examines autism as a historically specific and power-laden cultural phenomenon that has much to teach about the social organization of a neoliberal western modernity. Bringing together a variety of interpretive theoretical perspectives including critical disability studies, queer and critical race theory, and cultural studies, the book analyzes the social significance and productive effects of contemporary discourses of autism as these are produced and circulated in the field of autism advocacy. Anne McGuire reveals how in the field of autism advocacy, autism often appears as an abbreviation, its multiple meanings distilled to various "red flag" warnings in awareness campaigns, bulleted biomedical "facts" in information pamphlets, or worrisome statistics in policy reports. She analyzes the relationships between these fragmentary enactments of autism and traces their continuities to reveal an underlying, powerful, and ubiquitous logic of violence that casts autism as a pathological threat that advocacy must work to eliminate. Such logic, McGuire contends, functions to delimit the role of the "good" autism advocate to one who is positioned "against" autism. Book jacket.

Download or read book Divided Environments written by Jan Selby and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2022-09-22 with total page 361 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An original 'international political ecology' analysis of the implications of climate change and water scarcity for twenty-first-century conflict and security.

Download or read book Homeland Insecurities written by Sanjay Barbora and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2022-05-30 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'Homeland Insecurities' engages with the impact of counterinsurgency, migration, and conflicts arising out of demands for autonomy in Assam, Northeast India. It asks three sets of related questions: (a) what are the origins of demands for ethnic homelands? (b) why does migration continue to be such an overarching oeuvre in political discourse in Assam and how does one engage with new forms of mobility? (c) how does a society recover from counterinsurgency and what are the new forms of militarisation that are emerging in the present? Working on the main argument that demands for autonomy and social justice have been central themes that have been historically articulated in Assam, it shows the tensions that arise in explanations about causes of conflict in the state. These tensions, I argue, are best understood through a critical engagement with everyday politics of organisations and individuals working on the ground. Although there is a general tendency to read conflict in Assam through the lenses of ethnicity and development, nevertheless there is evidence to show that affect offers an additional analytical tool because of its ability to offer a layered, sometimes paradoxical account of events and situations that cause conflicts in the region.

Download or read book The Social Lives of Land written by Michael Goldman and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2024-06-15 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the shaping of new homelands in the Cherokee Nation to the export of sand from Cambodia to shore up urban expansion in Singapore, The Social Lives of Land reveals the dynamics of contemporary social and political change. The editors of this volume bring together contributions from across multiple disciplines and geographic locations. The contributions showcase novel theoretical and empirical insights, analyzing how people are living on, with, and from their land. From Mozambique to India, Indonesia, Ecuador, and the colonial United States, the scholars in this collection uncover histories and retell stories with a focus on the lived experiences of rural and urban land dispossession and repossession. Contributors: Kati Álvarez, Clint Carroll, Flora Lu, Richard Mbunda, Gregg Mitman, Paul Nadasdy, Robert Nichols, Andrew Ofstehage, Laura Schoenberger, Kirsteen Shields, Emmanuel Sulle, Erik Swyngedouw, Gabriela Valdivia, Katherine Verdery, Callum Ward, Ciara Wirth, Emmanuel King Urey Yarkpawolo

Download or read book The Politics of Uncertainty written by Ian Scoones and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-07-14 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why is uncertainty so important to politics today? To explore the underlying reasons, issues and challenges, this book’s chapters address finance and banking, insurance, technology regulation and critical infrastructures, as well as climate change, infectious disease responses, natural disasters, migration, crime and security and spirituality and religion. The book argues that uncertainties must be understood as complex constructions of knowledge, materiality, experience, embodiment and practice. Examining in particular how uncertainties are experienced in contexts of marginalisation and precarity, this book shows how sustainability and development are not just technical issues, but depend deeply on political values and choices. What burgeoning uncertainties require lies less in escalating efforts at control, but more in a new – more collective, mutualistic and convivial – politics of responsibility and care. If hopes of much-needed progressive transformation are to be realised, then currently blinkered understandings of uncertainty need to be met with renewed democratic struggle. Written in an accessible style and illustrated by multiple case studies from across the world, this book will appeal to a wide cross-disciplinary audience in fields ranging from economics to law to science studies to sociology to anthropology and geography, as well as professionals working in risk management, disaster risk reduction, emergencies and wider public policy fields.

Download or read book Climate Change and Critical Agrarian Studies written by Ian Scoones and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2023-11-30 with total page 812 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Climate change is perhaps the greatest threat to humanity today and plays out as a cruel engine of myriad forms of injustice, violence and destruction. The effects of climate change from human-made emissions of greenhouse gases are devastating and accelerating; yet are uncertain and uneven both in terms of geography and socio-economic impacts. Emerging from the dynamics of capitalism since the industrial revolution — as well as industrialisation under state-led socialism — the consequences of climate change are especially profound for the countryside and its inhabitants. The book interrogates the narratives and strategies that frame climate change and examines the institutionalised responses in agrarian settings, highlighting what exclusions and inclusions result. It explores how different people — in relation to class and other co-constituted axes of social difference such as gender, race, ethnicity, age and occupation — are affected by climate change, as well as the climate adaptation and mitigation responses being implemented in rural areas. The book in turn explores how climate change – and the responses to it - affect processes of social differentiation, trajectories of accumulation and in turn agrarian politics. Finally, the book examines what strategies are required to confront climate change, and the underlying political-economic dynamics that cause it, reflecting on what this means for agrarian struggles across the world. The 26 chapters in this volume explore how the relationship between capitalism and climate change plays out in the rural world and, in particular, the way agrarian struggles connect with the huge challenge of climate change. Through a huge variety of case studies alongside more conceptual chapters, the book makes the often-missing connection between climate change and critical agrarian studies. The book argues that making the connection between climate and agrarian justice is crucial. The chapters in this book were originally published in The Journal of Peasant Studies.

Download or read book Gut Anthro written by Amber Benezra and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2023-05-09 with total page 259 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A fascinating ethnography of microbes that opens up new spaces for anthropological inquiry The trillions of microbes in and on our bodies are determined by not only biology but also our social connections. Gut Anthro tells the fascinating story of how a sociocultural anthropologist developed a collaborative “anthropology of microbes” with a human microbial ecologist to address global health crises across disciplines. It asks: what would it mean for anthropology to act with science? Based partly at a preeminent U.S. lab studying the human microbiome, the Center for Genome Sciences at Washington University, and partly at a field site in Bangladesh studying infant malnutrition, it examines how microbes travel between human guts in the “field” and in microbiome laboratories, influencing definitions of health and disease, and how the microbiome can change our views on evolution, agency, and life. As lab scientists studied the interrelationships between gut microbes and malnutrition in resource-poor countries, Amber Benezra explored ways to reconcile the scale and speed differences between the lab, the intimate biosocial practices of Bangladeshi mothers and their children, and the looming structural violence of poverty. In vital ways, Gut Anthro is about what it means to collaborate—with mothers, local field researchers in Bangladesh, massive philanthropic global health organizations, with the microbiome scientists, and, of course, with microbes. It follows microbes through various enactments in scientific research—microbes as kin, as data, and as race. Revealing how racial categories are used in microbiome research, Benezra argues that microbial differences need transdisciplinary collaboration to address racial health disparities without reifying race as a straightforward biological or social designation. Gut Anthro is a tour de force of science studies and medical anthropology as well as an intensely personal and deeply theoretical accounting of what it means to do anthropology today. Cover alt text: Black background overlaid with a pink organic path suggestive of a human digestive system. Title appears within the guts as if being processed.

Download or read book The Palgrave Handbook of Social Fieldwork written by Nasir Uddin and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2023-04-14 with total page 470 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This handbook offers epistemologically and ontologically important personal accounts of academic and professional researchers having long-term intensive, comprehensive and ethnographic fieldwork in various social settings and versatile regional contexts across the globe. The accounts are cross-disciplinary including anthropology, sociology, geography, political sciences, gender studies, forestry and environmental studies, economics, and international relations. They are also trans-regional, covering the globe including South Asia, Southeast Asia, Africa, Europe, Latin America and North America. The book offers a comprehensive portrait of multifaceted challenges that social researchers experience while doing fieldwork in various social settings. The accounts provide both challenges of doing fieldwork in the 21st century and the ways how to address/redress them in the field by complying with the codes of ethics, and the politics of fieldwork. Readers will benefit from the handbook by understanding methodological issues from both disciplinary relevance and regional specificity across time and spaces.

Download or read book Form and Flow written by Kian Goh and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2021-08-17 with total page 299 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An examination of urban climate change response strategies and the resistance to them by grassroots activists and social movements. Cities around the world are formulating plans to respond to climate change and adapt to its impact. Often, marginalized urban residents resist these plans, offering “counterplans” to protest unjust and exclusionary actions. In this book, Kian Goh examines climate change response strategies in three cities—New York, Jakarta, and Rotterdam—and the mobilization of community groups to fight the perceived injustices and oversights of these plans. Looking through the lenses of urban design and socioecological spatial politics, Goh reveals how contested visions of the future city are produced and gain power. Goh describes, on the one hand, a growing global network of urban environmental planning organizations intertwined with capitalist urban development, and, on the other, social movements that themselves often harness the power of networks. She explores such initiatives as Rebuild By Design in New York, the Giant Sea Wall plan in Jakarta, and Rotterdam Climate Proof, and discovers competing narratives, including community resiliency in Brooklyn and grassroots activism in the informal “kampungs” of Jakarta. Drawing on participatory fieldwork and her own background in architecture and urban design, Goh offers both theoretical explanations and practical planning and design strategies. She reframes the critical concerns of urban climate change responses, presenting a sociospatial typology of urban adaptation and considering the notion of a “just” resilience. Finally, she proposes a theoretical framework for designing equitable and just urban climate futures.

Download or read book Climate Change Small Scale Fisheries and Blue Justice written by Sunil D. Santha and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2023-04-14 with total page 172 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is a narrative non-fiction, based on the patchy epistemologies of traditional small-scale fishers in India and the Indian Ocean region. It specifically explores the impact of climate change on Fish and Fishers, and the mutual entanglements in their eco-social world. Further, it critically examines the nature of climate change adaptation and its implications on small-scale fisheries. Both climate change impact and adaptation responses are examined from the situated knowledge and everyday lived experiences of Fishers. Stories of their everyday struggles from diverse eco-social worlds shape these patchy epistemologies. Further, this book through these stories unearths the transitions in governance and changing relationships between Fish, Fishers, and the rest of the eco-social world. Responding ethically to the problems of climate change, warming oceans, fish scarcity, overfishing, and pollution requires us to break away from the paradigms that locate Nature and Society as binaries and commodities. Blue justice can be achieved only if strategies aimed at adaptation, conservation and well-being are dialogical, inclusive, and Fish-Fisher centred. This book offers insights into the worldviews of Fishers and their stewardship, wisdom, and experience in healing today’s warming world. Locating the eco-social worlds of Fish and Fishers in alternative worldviews, this book strives to find meaningful pathways for just transitions. It will be of interest to academics and researchers working in the field of climate change, fisheries, disaster studies, and sustainable livelihoods as well as related subjects of social work and social justice.

Download or read book Choreomata written by Roberto Alonso Trillo and published by CRC Press. This book was released on 2023-12-21 with total page 517 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Is artificial intelligence (AI) becoming more and more expressive, or is human thought adopting more and more structures from computation? What does it mean to perform oneself through AI, or to construct one’s subjectivity through AI? How does AI continue to complicate what it means to have a body? Has the golden age of AI, especially with regards to creative applications, already ended? Choreomata: Performance and Performativity after AI is a book about performance and performativity, but more specifically, it is a book about the performance of artificiality and the performance of intelligence. Both humans and human-designed computational forces are thoroughly engaged in an entangled, mutual performance of AI. Choreomata spins up a latticework of interdisciplinary thought, pairing theoretical inquiry from philosophy, information theory, and computer science with practical case studies from visual art, dance, music, and social theory. Through cross-disciplinary proportions and a diverse roster of contributors, this book contains insights for computer scientists, social scientists, industry professionals, artists, and beyond.