Download or read book Agency without Actors written by Jan-Hendrik Passoth and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2012-03-29 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The question of agency is a key issue in social theory and research. The discourse of human agency as an effect of social relations is deeply intertwined with the history of sociological thought. However, in most recent discussions the role of non-humans gains a substantial impact concerning agency. Agency without Actors? New Approaches to Collective Action asks: Are nonhumans active, do they have agency? And if so: how and in which different ways? Consequently, Agency without Actors? New Approaches to Collective Action outlines a wide range of novel accounts that link human and non-human agency tries to understand social-technical, political and environmental networks as different forms of agency that produce discrete and identifiable entities asks how different types of (often conflicting) agency and agents are distinguished in practice, how they are maintained and how they interfere with each other. By studying the substantial impact of the role of non-humans in connection with human relations, the book aims to advance the discourse on agency and investigates into the different possible modes of human and nonhuman interplay. This book is essential reading for students and scholars of sociology, science and technology studies, social anthropology, animal studies, environmental studies and social theory.

Download or read book Collective Agency and Cooperation in Natural and Artificial Systems written by Catrin Misselhorn and published by Springer. This book was released on 2015-09-01 with total page 314 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book brings together philosophical approaches to cooperation and collective agency with research into human-machine interaction and cooperation from engineering, robotics, computer science and AI. Bringing these so far largely unrelated fields of study together leads to a better understanding of collective agency in natural and artificial systems and will help to improve the design and performance of hybrid systems involving human and artificial agents. Modeling collective agency with the help of computer simulations promises also philosophical insights into the emergence of collective agency. The volume consists of four sections. The first section is dedicated to the concept of agency. The second section of the book turns to human-machine cooperation. The focus of the third section is the transition from cooperation to collective agency. The last section concerns the explanatory value of social simulations of collective agency in the broader framework of cultural evolution.

Download or read book Composing Processes and Artistic Agency written by Tasos Zembylas and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-07-31 with total page 311 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This monograph carries out an in-depth investigation into compositional processes, shedding new light on the components and conditions that constitute artistic agency. Artistic agency relies on the interlocking of such activities that emerge from various propositional and non-propositional (experiential, corporeal, sensory) forms of knowledge - listening, feeling, imagining, trying out, reflecting, noting and correcting, which represents a small selection of the multifaceted composing activities. The book develops an understanding of artistic agency and mastery in its fundamentally social nature, through the important, though largely ignored output of creative compositional processes. Using a mixture of case studies and theoretical frameworks, this book will appeal to sociologists, musicologists, creative studies scholars, and artists, particularly those who teach composition or research on this topic, as well as students of MA- and PhD-level.

Download or read book More Than Machines written by Laura Voss and published by transcript Verlag. This book was released on 2021-02-28 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We know that robots are just machines. Why then do we often talk about them as if they were alive? Laura Voss explores this fascinating phenomenon, providing a rich insight into practices of animacy (and inanimacy) attribution to robot technology: from science-fiction to robotics R&D, from science communication to media discourse, and from the theoretical perspectives of STS to the cognitive sciences. Taking an interdisciplinary perspective, and backed by a wealth of empirical material, Voss shows how scientists, engineers, journalists - and everyone else - can face the challenge of robot technology appearing »a little bit alive« with a reflexive and yet pragmatic stance.

Download or read book Post Human Institutions and Organizations written by Ismael Al-Amoudi and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-11-11 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When the Matrix trilogy was published in the mid-1980s, it introduced to mass culture a number of post-human tropes about the conscious machines that have haunted our collective imaginaries ever since. This volume explores the social representations and significance of technological developments – especially AI and human enhancement – that have started to transform our human agency. It uses these developments to revisit theories of the human mind and its essential characteristics: a first-person perspective, concerns and reflexivity. It looks at how the smart machines are used as agents of change in the basic institutions and organisations that hold contemporary societies together, for example in the family and the household, in commercial corporations, in health institutions or in the military. Its main purpose is to enrich the ongoing public discussion of the social and political implications of the smart machines by looking at the extent to which they further digitalise and bureaucratise the world, in particular by asking whether they are used to develop techno-totalitarian societies that corrode normativity and solidarity.

Download or read book Soundweaving written by Franziska Schroder and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2014-06-30 with total page 185 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is about music improvisation. It forges exciting and provocative new links between a range of theories and practices in texts that explore topics as varied as object-oriented ontology, game theory, ethical responsibility and breath. In improvisatory fashion, this book has been edited so that it weaves the texts amongst each other, subversively inserting a tactile piece of text – a text interlaced, as a woven cloth, among the contributing authors. The writings in this volume are both timely and diverse, exploring as they do an array of interdisciplinary and critical discourses, thereby illuminating the field of improvisation from different perspectives within the radical and diverse contexts that undercut contemporary improvisation studies and practices. It consists of eight chapters as researched by practising musicians and theorists and an introduction by one of the most inspiring improvisers of our generation – Evan Parker.

Download or read book Jumbos and Jumping Devils written by Nisha P.R. and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2020-06-12 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Jumbos and Jumping Devils is a pioneering exploration of the social history of circus in India over the last 150 years. It presents a wide variety of amazing tales ranging from the blooming and evolution of circus acrobatics in early twentieth-century Malabar to the sensational legal battles following the ban of wild animals and children from the circus ring in the twenty-first century. Alongside extensive fieldwork and interviews, the author has used memorabilia including photographs, notices, posters, letters, diaries, unpublished autobiographies, private papers, and recollections of the circus community to chronicle the hitherto untold story of the Indian circus. The book paves the way for a new sociocultural analysis of performance genres and popular culture in the subcontinent against several overlapping contexts. These include the remaking of caste and gender identities, transformation of physical cultures and bodies, interventions of the colonial and postcolonial states, and emergence of new transregional and transnational spaces.

Download or read book Sync or Swarm Revised Edition written by David Borgo and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2022-02-10 with total page 314 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The revised edition of Sync or Swarm promotes an ecological view of musicking, moving us from a subject-centered to a system-centered view of improvisation. It explores cycles of organismic self-regulation, cycles of sensorimotor coupling between organism and environment, and cycles of intersubjective interaction mediated via socio-technological networks. Chapters funnel outward, from the solo improviser (Evan Parker), to nonlinear group dynamics (Sam Rivers trio), to networks that comprise improvisational communities, to pedagogical dynamics that affect how individuals learn, completing the hermeneutic circle. Winner of the Society for Ethnomusicology's Alan Merriam prize in its first edition, the revised edition features new sections that highlight electro-acoustic and transcultural improvisation, and concomitant issues of human-machine interaction and postcolonial studies.

Download or read book Transformations of Security Studies written by Gabi Schlag and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-10-30 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume brings together a group of distinguished scholars to engage in a dialogue on key developments in the study of security. The book provides a comprehensive overview of theoretical, empirical and methodological developments within security studies, whose political and societal importance has grown significantly in recent years. By bringing together scholars who hold differing perspectives on security, this volume provides insights into a variety of approaches and their newest developments, including ‘mainstream’ as well as heterodox perspectives on security. Thus, it aims to build bridges of communication between different ‘camps’ by initiating a dialogue on the identity and diversity of security studies. It does so in three parts: The first part of the book includes paradigmatic approaches to security that are closely connected to major debates in International Relations such as realism, institutionalism, constructivism as well as approaches to the culture, ethics of security and critical security studies. The second part places emphasis on the broadening and deepening of the concept of security in recent decades. It discusses key empirical frontiers including the continued centrality of the state, the link between democracy and security, environmental security as well as financial security. The third part of the book presents various methodological approaches to the question of security and peace. It provides an overview of new approaches such as the visual turn, quantifying security and method combinations. This book will be of much interest to students of critical security studies, international relations and research methods.

Download or read book HCI in Business Government and Organizations Interacting with Information Systems written by Fiona Fui-Hoon Nah and published by Springer. This book was released on 2017-06-28 with total page 428 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This 2-volume set constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 4th International Conference on HCI in Business, Government and Organizations, HCIBGO 2017, held as part of the 19 International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction , HCII 2017, which took place in Vancouver, Canada, in July 2017. HCII 2017 received a total of 4340 submissions, of which 1228 papers were accepted for publication after a careful reviewing process. The 31 papers presented in this volume, focusing on interacting with information systems, are organized in topical sections named: human-centered design in information systems; information systems in healthcare, learning, cultural heritage and government; novel interaction devices and techniques;

Download or read book Modes of Bio Bordering written by Nina Amelung and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2020-10-30 with total page 155 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This open access book explores how biometric data is increasingly flowing across borders in order to limit, control and contain the mobility of selected people, namely criminalized populations. It introduces the concept of bio-bordering, using it to capture reverse patterns of bordering and ordering practices linked to transnational biometric data exchange regimes. The concept is useful to reconstruct how the territorial foundations of national state autonomy are partially reclaimed and, at the same time, partially purposefully suspended. The book focuses on the Prüm system, which facilitates the mandatory exchange of forensic DNA data amongst EU Member States. The Prüm system is an underexplored phenomenon, representing diverse instances of bio-bordering and providing a complex picture of the hidden (dis)integration of Europe. Particular legal, scientific, technical and political dimensions related to the governance and uses of biometric technologies in Germany, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal and the United Kingdom are specifically explored to demonstrate both similar and distinct patterns.

Download or read book Making Sense of Expertise written by Reiner Grundmann and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2022-10-24 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Current debates about experts are often polarized and based on mistaken assumptions, with expertise either defended or denigrated. Making Sense of Expertise instead proposes a conceptual framework for the study of expertise in order to facilitate a more nuanced understanding of the role of expertise in contemporary society. Too often different meanings of experts and expertise are implied without making them explicit. Grundmann’s approach to expertise is based on a synthesis of approaches that exist in various fields of knowledge. The book aims at dispelling much of the confusion by offering a comprehensive and rigorous framework for the study of expertise. A series of in-depth case studies drawn from contemporary issues, including the climate crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic, provide the empirical basis of the author’s comprehensive approach. This thought-provoking book will be of great interests to students, instructors and researchers in a range of fields in the humanities, social sciences, and science and technology studies.

Download or read book Robo and Informationethics written by Michael Decker and published by LIT Verlag Münster. This book was released on 2012 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Robo- and Informationethics is a new field of applied ethics, which currently undergoes some fascinating and fundamental transformations: the emergence of new types of robotic technologies, such as autonomous systems and artificial agents, which generate serious threats to the understanding of human beings as the only strictly autonomously acting entities. This book focuses on some of the most pressing methodological, ethical, and technique-philosophical questions that are connected with the concept of artificial autonomous systems. (Series: Hermeneutics and Anthropology / Hermeneutik und Anthropologie - Vol. 3)

Download or read book Beyond the Creative Species written by Oliver Bown and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2021-02-23 with total page 417 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A multidisciplinary introduction to the field of computational creativity, analyzing the impact of advanced generative technologies on art and music. As algorithms get smarter, what role will computers play in the creation of music, art, and other cultural artifacts? Will they be able to create such things from the ground up, and will such creations be meaningful? In Beyond the Creative Species, Oliver Bown offers a multidisciplinary examination of computational creativity, analyzing the impact of advanced generative technologies on art and music. Drawing on a wide range of disciplines, including artificial intelligence and machine learning, design, social theory, the psychology of creativity, and creative practice research, Bown argues that to understand computational creativity, we must not only consider what computationally creative algorithms actually do, but also examine creative artistic activity itself.

Download or read book Technology Assessment in Practice and Theory written by Armin Grunwald and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-11-08 with total page 298 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Technological advance affects almost all areas of human life. Rapid digitization, increased mobility, new biotechnologies, and nanotechnology deeply influence, amongst others, industrial production, entertainment, work, military affairs, and individual life. Besides overwhelmingly positive effects on wealth, comfort, innovation, and development, this also raises questions of unintended effects, of tensions with democracy, of the role of citizens, and of its sustainability facing environmental issues. Tools and procedures are needed to cope with this challenging situation. Technology assessment (TA) has been developed more than fifty years ago to enable science, the economy, and society to harvest the potential of new technology to the maximum extent possible and to deal responsibly with possible adverse effects. It was developed more than 50 years ago in the U.S. Congress and has diversified considerably in the meantime. Parliamentary TA in many European states and at the international level, participatory TA at the local and regional levels worldwide, and TA as part of engineering processes are the most relevant fields today. Technology assessment is a growing field of interdisciplinary research and scientific policy advice. This volume (a) gives an overview of motivations of TA, its history and its current practices, (b) develops a fresh theoretical perspective on TA rooted in social theory and philosophy, and (c) draws conclusions from the theoretical perspective for the further development of TA’s practices. It provides the first comprehensive view on the growing field of TA at the international level.

Download or read book Paradoxes of Interactivity written by Uwe Seifert and published by Transcript Verlag, Roswitha Gost, Sigrid Nokel u. Dr. Karin Werner. This book was released on 2015-09-25 with total page 343 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Current findings from anthropology, genetics, prehistory, cognitive and neuroscience indicate that human nature is grounded in a co-evolution of tool use, symbolic communication, social interaction and cultural transmission. Digital information technology has recently entered as a new tool in this co-evolution, and will probably have the strongest impact on shaping the human mind in the near future. A common effort from the humanities, the sciences, art and technology is necessary to understand this ongoing co- evolutionary process. Interactivity is a key for understanding the new relationships formed by humans with social robots as well as interactive environments and wearables underlying this process. Of special importance for understanding interactivity are human-computer and human-robot interaction, as well as media theory and New Media Art. »Paradoxes of Interactivity« brings together reflections on »interactivity« from different theoretical perspectives, the interplay of science and art, and recent technological developments for artistic applications, especially in the realm of sound.

Download or read book Simulation Based Usability Evaluation of Spoken and Multimodal Dialogue Systems written by Stefan Hillmann and published by Springer. This book was released on 2017-11-23 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book describes an extension of the user behaviour simulation (UBS) of an existing tool for automatic usability evaluation (AUE). This extension is based upon a user study with a smart home system. It uses technical-sociological methods for the execution of the study and the analysis of the collected data. A comparison of the resulting UBS with former UBSs, as well as the empirical data, shows that the new simulation approach outperforms the former simulation. The improvement affects the prediction of dialogue metrics that are related to dialogue efficiency and dialogue effectiveness. Furthermore, the book describes a parameter-based data model, as well as a related framework. Both are used to uniformly describe multimodal human-computer interactions and to provide such descriptions for usability evaluations. Finally, the book proposes a new two-stage method for the evaluation of UBSs. The method is based on the computation of a distance measures between two dialogue corpora and the pair-wise comparison of distances among several dialogue corpora.