Download or read book Utopia Myopia written by Barbara Stauffacher Solomon and published by . This book was released on 2013 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Taming Technology written by H. Koerten and published by IOS Press. This book was released on 2011 with total page 263 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It is often assumed that innovative technology is an essential resource for the establishment of an information infrastructure. This study on geoinformation infrastructures convincingly demonstrates that technology is an important and far more complex factor than much geoinformation practitioners want us to believe. Three Dutch cases were studied, of which two were intended to develop an infrastructure deliberately applying innovative technology. Due to a constant stream of innovations these cases failed to bring about a working infrastructure. The third case was aimed at establishing a system of large-scale basemaps. These maps acted as a 'narrative anchor', a non-tangible interface between innovating technology and the infrastructure to be developed. Through the narrative anchor, this infrastructure has already existed for over 35 years and is likely to continue.
Download or read book Surveying Utopia written by Marc Batko and published by BookRix. This book was released on 2013-08-20 with total page 75 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Unlike a chair, an idea can be shared by a whole people. The time is right for alternative economics, reduced working hours, redefining work, security, health and happiness, person-oriented work, labor-intensive investment (not capital-intensive investments) and soft power. The only way to solve the three crises of mass unemployment,m environment destruction and trade imbalance is to move from quantitative to qualitative growth (cf. Hans-Christoph Binswanger). Access could replace excess as enou9gh could replace more. Possessions possess us more than we possess them. The car is more than a metal box but is a whole way of thinking encouraging domination, narcissism, solipsism and self-righteousness. Consumerism goes through the roof, not population. We have enough for everyone's need, not for everyone's greed (cf. Gandhi). The dialogue "Surviving Utopia" with Elmar Altvater and Raul Zelik intimates the wonders and obstacles to utopian thinking. Utopia, the place of no-place, is more a goal and objective than a concrete reality. Economics changes with the times. Once savings was the elixirr and then spending became the elixir. States are different than Swabian housewives. They can become indebted and invest and safeguard their future. What is rational from a microeconomic perspective can be destructive from a macroeconomic perspective. Increasing competitiveness is sensible for an individual corporation or businessperson but may be disastrous if all countries reduce their workforces. Wages are both costs and demand or purchasing power. Neoliberal myths and assumptions give unbounded freedom to capital while demeaning labor as only an inevitable cost. The articles "Learning from History," "Community Centers in O Canada," "Nature as Healer and Teacher," "Cinderella's Sisters and King Midas" and "Shouting from the Caboose" are invitations to ecological, sustainable, respectful and future-oriented change. "We must be wounded to be healed," Dorothee Soelle said. Have we been sufficiently wounded by materialism, imperial hubris, the financial crisis, deregulation, commodification, instrumental rationality, suburbanization and the work religion? In "Surveying Utopia," the emeritus professor Elmar Altvater shares the Polish proverb: You can make fish soup out of an aquarium but you can't make an aquarium out of fish soup. The future should be anticipated and protected in the present, not extrapolated from the present. The future could be full of community centers, free Internet books and soft power if we become active subjects and not passive objects, enthralled in the present and future like children. Music, books and questions make our lives rich and independent of the trickle-down market jingles.
Download or read book Utopia Euphoria Myopia written by Akin O. Akindele and published by Xlibris Corporation. This book was released on 1999-03-12 with total page 136 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a book of poetry, musical lyrics and fictional short stories. It is designed to give the reader a full flavor of the author's range and the diverse subject matters that many would clearly relate.
Download or read book Myopia Or Utopia written by T.F. Evans and published by . This book was released on 1984 with total page 145 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Utopia Method Vision written by Tom Moylan and published by Peter Lang. This book was released on 2007 with total page 350 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection addresses the ways in which the contributors approach their study of the objects and practices of utopianism (understood as social anticipations and visions produced through texts and social experiments) and of how, in turn, those objects and practices have shaped their intellectual work and research perspectives.
Download or read book Inspiration written by Akin O. Akindele and published by Xlibris Corporation. This book was released on 2002-03-11 with total page 206 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is about life and how to attain or approximate our most important aspirations. It is designed to benefit everyone involved in any kind of venture, or relationship. The book is especially important to people who, on a daily basis, have to achieve important (personal or business) objectives by persuading others to see things their way, or at least to meet them half way for a constructive and beneficial outcome. This book is about life in all of its aspects. It attempts to reach and be helpful to each reader in most aspects of life, which the reader may need to improve, or re-evaluate. Part of the objective of this book is to make a person acting in an informed manner, become more comfortable with the choices that may from time to time be made. Understanding why those choices were made, and owning the benefits and being prepared to stoically deal with the attendant consequences that may flow from those choices. To be sure, this book is partly a concession to the sometimes unfathomable world in which we live. It is therefore no more than my own imperfect effort of attempting to make some sense out of how and why things are the way they are. How and why things have tended to work best for most people who have been deemed successful in various aspects of human endeavor, whether as a great parent, effective leader, a good advocate, an inspired creator of abundant wealth, an admired citizen, a trusted partner, or a great friend. Briefly, therefore, this book is divided into three broad chapters. Each chapter is further sub-divided into appropriate sections, for an easy and hopefully logical flow. Chapter one attempts to lay out the general foundation for the kinds of issues and challenges to be addressed. Chapter two addresses these issues in the context of various life circumstances and relationships we each find, or may from time to time, find ourselves. Chapter three, the last chapter, hopefully succeeds in tying it all together. The goal of the book is achieved. By the time one completes reading the book, each reader will be able to identify a personal road map for success. And this road map is applicable to whatever field of endeavor, or aspect of life, that each person may desire greater measure of success. As we each pursue our respective aspirations which could range from a desire to be loved and embraced; a quest to be perceived as worthy; an important recognition, respect, reward, or some other opportunity, it is very important to be very cognizant of the kinds of actions, attitude, or mind set, that are more likely than not, to aid us in attaining the ultimate goal we crave. I call the constructive application of these various life tenets, THE WINNING FORMULA.
Download or read book Utopia written by Alistair Fox and published by . This book was released on 1993 with total page 154 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Thomas More's Utopia remains indisputably the most potent work in the genre of writing that it initiated and in fact named. Since it was published in 1516 - in a Tudor-ruled England responding to the wave of humanist thought sweeping across Europe - this fantasy voyage has inspired centuries of social reformers, who have embraced More's fiction as a realistic blueprint for a new, ideal society. On the literary side, writers from Jonathan Swift to George Orwell have plied the genre More invented, and yet none has arrived at a conclusion more prophetic than the original: that the dogged quest for an imagined ideal generates doubt that this ideal would be as attractive in practice as in theory, and that, given what we know of human nature, such an ideal could ever be implemented. In Utopia: An Elusive Vision Alistair Fox places More's masterwork in the context of the reform aspirations of early-sixteenth-century European humanists, tracing the stages of its composition to show how and why the book came to be inherently paradoxical and showing us why the book in many ways presaged the rise of Martin Luther and the watershed Protestant Reformation. Fox lucidly explores the complex, equivocal nature of More's vision, which, he contends, was conditioned not only by More's recognition that people's desire for ideal social order conflicts with many of their most basic impulses but also by his propensity for seeing most issues simultaneously from contradictory perspectives. This paradox and tension led More to create a fiction that, according to Fox, allows human imperfection to interrogate the validity of the "ideal" society the fiction presents, without confirming or subverting it. With UtopiaMore encourages readers to explore what he reveals to be a perpetual dilemma in utopianism itself. Fox concludes that, by thus encompassing and provoking the full range of reactions that subsequent utopias and "dystopias" would likely elicit, More's Utopia is both the prototype and epitome of the utopian genre itself. Fox's engaging study is the most extensive treatment of Utopia to date, examining the work as one which evolved in response to More's changing emotional perceptions and treating More's text as a vehicle for intellectual exploration rather than a definitive proclamation. Utopia: An Elusive Vision, replete with historical detail and an overview of criticism of More's text through four centuries, allows readers to discern for themselves the features that contribute to Utopia's intellectual and rhetorical complexity.
Download or read book The Utopian Vision written by Saint Thomas More and published by University Press of America. This book was released on 1983 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: To find out more information about Rowman & Littlefield titles please visit us at www.rowmanlittlefield.com.
Download or read book Embodied Utopias written by Amy Bingaman and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2003-12-16 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Utopia has become a dirty word in recent scholarship on modernism, architecture, urban planning and gender studies. Many utopian designs now appear impractical, manifesting an arrogant disregard for the lived experiences of the ordinary inhabitants who make daily use of global public and private spaces. The essays in Embodied Utopias argue that the gendered body is the crux of the hopes and disappointments of modern urban and suburban utopias of the Americas, Europe and Asia. They reassess utopian projects - masculinist, feminist, colonialist, progressive - of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; they survey the dystopian landscapes of the present; and they gesture at the potential for an embodied approach to the urban future, to the changing spaces of cities and virtual landscapes.
Download or read book The Decomposition of Sociology written by Irving Louis Horowitz and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 1993 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The author examines the field of sociology and the closing of many sociology departments and then proposes "an alternative, plsitive view of social research."--Jacket.
Download or read book The Post Utopian Imagination written by M. Keith Booker and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2002-01-30 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In America, the long 1950s were marked by an intense skepticism toward utopian alternatives to the existing capitalist order. This skepticism was closely related to the climate of the Cold War, in which the demonization of socialism contributed to a dismissal of all alternatives to capitalism. This book studies how American novels and films of the long 1950s reflect the loss of the utopian imagination and mirror the growing concern that capitalism brought routinization, alienation, and other dehumanizing consequences. The volume relates the decline of the utopian vision to the rise of late capitalism, with its expanding globalization and consumerism, and to the beginnings of postmodernism. In addition to well-known literary novels, such as Nabokov's Lolita, Booker explores a large body of leftist fiction, popular novels, and the films of Alfred Hitchcock and Walt Disney. The book argues that while the canonical novels of the period employ a utopian aesthetic, that aesthetic tends to be very weak and is not reinforced by content. The leftist novels, on the other hand, employ a realist aesthetic but are utopian in their exploration of alternatives to capitalism. The study concludes that the utopian energies in cultural productions of the long 1950s are very weak, and that these works tend to dismiss utopian thinking as na^Dive or even sinister. The weak utopianism in these works tends to be reflected in characteristics associated with postmodernism.
Download or read book Horizons of the Future written by Graham B. Slater and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2024-06-14 with total page 122 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Horizons of the Future: Science Fiction, Utopian Imagination, and the Politics of Education examines the relationship between science fiction, education, and social change in the 21st century. Global capitalism is ecologically unsustainable and ethically indefensible; time is running out to alter the course of history if humanity is to have hope of a livable future beyond the next century. However, alternatives are possible, offering much more equality, care, justice, joy, and hope than the established order. Popular culture and schools are key sites of struggles to imagine such alternatives. Drawing on critical theory, cultural studies, and sociology, Slater articulates the promising connection between science fiction and the future of education. He offers cutting-edge engagement with themes, perspectives, and modes of imagination in science fiction that can be mobilized politically and pedagogically to envision and enact critical forms of education that cultivate new utopian ways of relating to self, society, and the future. This thought-provoking book will be of interest to scholars and students in the social sciences and education.
Download or read book In Search of the Utopian States of America written by Verena Adamik and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2020-12-01 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book endeavours to understand the seemingly direct link between utopianism and the USA, discussing novels that have never been brought together in this combination before, even though they all revolve around intentional communities: Imlay’s The Emigrants (1793), Hawthorne’s The Blithedale Romance (1852), Howland’s Papas Own Girl (1874), Griggs’s Imperium in Imperio (1899), and Du Bois’s The Quest of the Silver Fleece (1911). They relate nation and utopia not by describing perfect societies, but by writing about attempts to immediately live radically different lives. Signposting the respective communal history, the readings provide a literary perspective to communal studies, and add to a deeply necessary historicization for strictly literary approaches to US utopianism, and for studies that focus on Pilgrims/Puritans/Founding Fathers as utopian practitioners. This book therefore highlights how the authors evaluated the USA’s utopian potential and traces the nineteenth-century development of the utopian imagination from various perspectives.
Download or read book Utopias of One written by Joshua Kotin and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2019-11-05 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Utopias fail. Utopias of one do not. They are perfect worlds. Yet their success comes at a cost. They are radically singular—and thus exclusive and inimitable. Utopias of One is a major new account of utopian writing. Joshua Kotin examines how eight writers—Henry David Thoreau, W. E. B. Du Bois, Osip and Nadezhda Mandel’shtam, Anna Akhmatova, Wallace Stevens, Ezra Pound, and J. H. Prynne—construct utopias of one within and against modernity’s two large-scale attempts to harmonize individual and collective interests: liberalism and communism. The book begins in the United States between the buildup to the Civil War and the end of Jim Crow; continues in the Soviet Union between Stalinism and the late Soviet period; and concludes in England and the United States between World War I and the end of the Cold War. The book, in this way, captures how writers from disparate geopolitical contexts resist state and normative power to construct perfect worlds—for themselves alone. Utopias of One makes a vital contribution to debates about literature and politics, presenting innovative arguments about aesthetic difficulty, personal autonomy, and complicity and dissent. The book also models a new approach to transnational and comparative scholarship, combining original research in English and Russian to illuminate more than a century and a half of literary and political history.
Download or read book Utopias and the Environment written by Geoffrey Berry and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-10-02 with total page 127 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Utopias and the Environment explores the way in which the kind of ‘dreaming’, or re-visioning, known as the ‘utopian imaginary’ takes environmental concerns into account. This kind of creative intervention is increasingly important in an era of ecological crisis, as we witness the failure of governments worldwide to significantly change industrial civilization from a path of ‘business as usual.’ In this context, it is up to the artists – in this case authors – to imagine new ways of being that respond to this imperative and immediate global issue. Concurrently, it is also up to critics, readers, and thinkers everywhere to appraise these narratives of possibility for their complexities and internal conflicts, as well as for their promise, as we enter this new era of rapid change and adaptation. Because creative and critical thinkers must work together towards this goal, the idea of the critical utopia, coined by Tom Moylan in response to the fiction of the 1970s, is now ingrained in the common argot and is one of the key ideas discussed in this book. This development in the genre, which combines self-reflexivity and multiple perspectives within its dreaming, represents the postmodern spirit in its most regenerative aspect. This book is testament to such hopes and potential realities. This book was originally published as a special issue of Green Letters.
Download or read book Feminism Economics and Utopia written by Karin Schonpflug and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2008-03-26 with total page 295 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Are there feminist, economic utopian visions amongst feminist economists? What are these visions? Is there a common vision for feminist economics or should there be? Can feminist economics be effective without a utopian vision?Comprehensive and original, this book surveys the entire field of utopian literature; from Plato to the present. Answering
