Download or read book Distributed Agency written by N. J. Enfield and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017-01-04 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Distributed Agency presents an interdisciplinary inroad into the latest thinking about the distributed nature of agency: what it's like, what are its conditions of possibility, and what are its consequences. The book's 25 chapters are written by a wide range of scholars, from anthropology, biology, cognitive science, linguistics, philosophy, psychology, geography, law, economics, and sociology. While each chapter takes up different materials using different methods, they all chart relations between the key elements of agency: intentionality, causality, flexibility and accountability. Each chapter seeks to explain how and why such relations are distributed-not just across individuals, but also across bodies and minds, people and things, spaces and times. To do this, the authors work through empirical studies of particular cases, while also offering reviews and syntheses of key ideas from the authors' respective research traditions. Our goals with this collection of essays are to assemble insights from new research on the anatomy of human agency, to address divergent framings of the issues from different disciplines, and to suggest directions for new debates and lines of research. We hope that it will be a resource for researchers working on allied topics, and for students learning about the elements of human-specific modes of shared action, from causality, intentionality, and personhood to ethics, punishment, and accountability.
Download or read book Distributed Agency written by N. J. Enfield and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This book presents the latest thinking on the distributed nature of agency: its nature, its causes, its consequences. The book opens up fundamental questions about human agency, and offer answers that are state-of-the-art and interdisciplinary, yet accessible"--
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 229 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Agency without Actors? New Approaches to collective Action is rethinking a key issue in social theory and research: the question of agency. The history of sociological thought is deeply intertwined with the discourse of human agency as an effect of social relations. In most recent discussions the role of non-humans gains a substantial impact. Consequently the book asks: Are nonhumans active, do they have agency? And if so: how and in what different ways? The volume offers a critical state-of-the-art debate of internationally and nationally leading scholars within Sociology, Social Anthropology and STS on agency (Latour, Law, Michael, Rammert etc.). It fosters the productive exchange of empirical settings and theoretical views by outlining a wide range of novel accounts that link human and non-human agency. It tries to understand social-technical, political and environmental networks as different forms of agency that produce discrete and identifiable entities like humans, animals, technical artifacts. It also asks how different types of (often conflicting) agency and agents actors are distinguished in practice, how they are maintained and how they interfere with each other"--
Download or read book Technology and Agency in International Relations written by Marijn Hoijtink and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-04-23 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book responds to a gap in the literature in International Relations (IR) by integrating technology more systematically into analyses of global politics. Technology facilitates, accelerates, automates, and exercises capabilities that are greater than human abilities. And yet, within IR, the role of technology often remains under-studied. Building on insights from science and technology studies (STS), assemblage theory and new materialism, this volume asks how international politics are made possible, knowable, and durable by and through technology. The contributors provide empirically rich and pertinent accounts of a variety of technologies relevant to the discipline, including drones, algorithms, satellite imagery, border management databases, and blockchains. Problematizing various technologically mediated issues, such as secrecy, violence, and questions of how authority and evidence become constituted in international contexts, this book will be of interest to scholars in IR, in particular those who work in the subfields of (critical) security studies, International Political Economy, and Global Governance.
Download or read book Scientific Explanation Causality and Agency written by Majid D. Beni and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2024-07-12 with total page 203 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book draws on advances in computational neuroscience and theoretical biology to provide a clear and accessible agentive account of the nature of causality and scientific explanations. Instead of attempting to establish the elements of scientific explanation, such as causality, in a reality unadulterated by a human perspective, this book relies on scientific facts about cognition to describe the structure of agency from a distinctly human perspective. The book draws on the Free Energy Principle to reinforce the agency theory of causality and extend it to an account of explanation as well. This principle not only provides a theoretical account of how self-organising systems engage with the causal structure of the environment, but it also offers a viable notion of agency and is compatible with the projectivist aspects of the agency theory. Scientific Explanation, Causality, and Agency will appeal to researchers and advanced students working in philosophy of science, philosophy of cognitive science, epistemology, computational neuroscience, and theoretical biology.
Download or read book Knowing Nature written by Mara J. Goldman and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2011-04-15 with total page 374 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In addition, they examine how various environmental knowledge claims are generated, packaged, promoted, and accepted (or rejected) by the different actors involved in specific cases of environmental management, conservation, and development.
Download or read book Agency and Media Reception written by Susanne Eichner and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2014-01-21 with total page 255 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What happens to our sense of agency, our general ability to perform actions in our life worlds, in the course of media reception and appropriation? Whilst considering media communication as a special form of social action, this work reconsiders the key concepts of social action theory, pragmatism, communication theory as well as film, game and television theory. It thus integrates agency as the key to understanding ‘doing media’ and at the same time conceptualizes agency as a specific mode of involvement across media boundaries. This approach amalgamates miscellaneous ideas and conceptions such as interactivity, participation, cognitive control, play or empowerment and applies the theoretical considerations on the basis of textual analyses of the films Inception and The Proposal, the TV shows Lost and I’m a Celebrity and the video games Grand Theft Auto IV and The Walking Dead.
Download or read book Critical Security Methods written by Claudia Aradau and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-08-13 with total page 239 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Critical Security Methods offers a new approach to research methods in critical security studies. It argues that methods are not simply tools to bridge the gap between security theory and security practice. Rather, to practise methods critically means engaging in a more free and experimental interplay between theory, methods and practice. This recognises that the security practices we research are often methods in their own right, as forms of surveillance, data mining, visualisation, and so on, and that our own research methods are themselves practices that intervene and interfere in those sites of security and insecurity. Against the familiar methdological language of rigour, detachment and procedural consistency, Critical Security Methods reclaims the idea of method as experiment. The chapters offer a series of methodological experimentations that assemble concepts, theory and empirical cases into new frameworks for critical security research. They show how critical engagement and methodological innovation can be practiced as interventions into diverse instances of insecurity and securitisation, including airports, drug trafficking, peasant struggles, biometrics and police kettling. The book will be a valuable resource for students and researchers in critical security studies, politics and international relations.
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 Agents Actors Actorhood written by Hokyu Hwang and published by Emerald Group Publishing. This book was released on 2019-04-05 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume gathers a range of institutional perspectives investigating what the devolution of state power and the so-called democratization of social action means for the nature of authority and how the multiplicity and variety of social actors impacts societies worldwide, extending from focus on agents to actors to actorhood.
Download or read book The SoJo Journal written by Brad J. Porfilio and published by IAP. This book was released on 2020-12-01 with total page 130 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The SoJo Journal: Educational Foundations and Social Justice Education is an international, peer-reviewed journal of educational foundations. San Jose State University hosts the journal. It publishes essays that examine contemporary educational and social contexts and practices from critical perspectives. The SoJo Journal: Educational Foundations and Social Justice Education is interested in research studies as well as conceptual, theoretical, philosophical, and policy-analysis essays that challenge the existing state of affairs in society, schools, and (in)formal education. The SoJo Journal: Educational Foundations and Social Justice Education is necessary because currently there is not an exclusively international foundations of education journal. For instance, three of the leading journal in education foundations journals (e.g., The Journal of Educational Studies, British Journal of Sociology of Education, The Journal of Educational Foundations) solicit manuscripts and support scholarship mainly from professors who reside in Britain and the United States. This journal is also unique because it brings together scholars and practitioners from disciplines outside of educational foundations, who are equally committed to social change and promoting equity and social justice inside and outside of K–16 schools. The SoJo Journal: Educational Foundations and Social Justice Education’s audience is K–12 teachers, K–12 teacher educators, educational leaders, social activists, political economists, and higher education personnel across the globe. The journal is marketed to Educational Foundation, Teacher Education, and Educational Leadership programs, which have embraced the intellectual work of the various editorial members.
Download or read book Cooperative Information Agents III written by Matthias Klusch and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 1999-07-21 with total page 768 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Third International Workshop on Cooperative Information Systems, CIA'99, held in Uppsala, Sweden in July/August 1999. The 16 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from a total of 46 submissions. Also included are ten invited contributions by leading experts. The volume is divided in sections on information discovery and management on the Internet; information agents on the Internet-prototypes systems and applications; communication and collaboration, mobile information agents; rational information agents for electronic business; service mediation and negotiation; and adaptive personal assistance.
Download or read book Code of Federal Regulations written by and published by . This book was released on 1969 with total page 554 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Special edition of the Federal Register, containing a codification of documents of general applicability and future effect ... with ancillaries.
Download or read book The Poetics of Visuality written by Justin J. White and published by Mohr Siebeck. This book was released on 2024-11-14 with total page 295 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Cycles of Contingency written by Susan Oyama and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2003-01-24 with total page 398 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The nature/nurture debate is not dead. Dichotomous views of development still underlie many fundamental debates in the biological and social sciences. Developmental systems theory (DST) offers a new conceptual framework with which to resolve such debates. DST views ontogeny as contingent cycles of interaction among a varied set of developmental resources, no one of which controls the process. These factors include DNA, cellular and organismic structure, and social and ecological interactions. DST has excited interest from a wide range of researchers, from molecular biologists to anthropologists, because of its ability to integrate evolutionary theory and other disciplines without falling into traditional oppositions.The book provides historical background to DST, recent theoretical findings on the mechanisms of heredity, applications of the DST framework to behavioral development, implications of DST for the philosophy of biology, and critical reactions to DST.
Download or read book Ontology and Closeness in Human Nature Relationships written by Neil H. Kessler and published by Springer. This book was released on 2018-10-10 with total page 348 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Ontology and Closeness in Human-Nature Relationships, Neil H. Kessler identifies the preconceptions which can keep the modern human mind in the dark about what is happening relationally between humans and the more-than-human world. He has written an accessible work of environmental philosophy, with a focus on the ontology of human-nature relationships. In it, he contends that large-scale environmental problems are intimate and relational in origin. He also challenges the deeply embedded, modernist assumptions about the relational limitations of more-than-human beings, ones which place erroneous limitations on the possibilities for human/more-than-human closeness. Diverging from the posthumanist literature and its frequent reliance on new materialist ontology, the arguments in the book attempt to sweep away what ecofeminists call “human/nature dualisms. In doing so, conceptual avenues open up that have the power to radically alter how we engage in our daily interactions with the more-than-human world all around us. Given the diversity of fields and disciplines focused on the human-nature relationship, the topics of this book vary quite broadly, but always converge at the nexus of what is possible between humans and more-than-human beings. The discussion interweaves the influence of human/nature dualisms with the limitations of Deleuzian becoming and posthumanism’s new materialism and agential realism. It leverages interhuman interdependence theory, Charles Peirce’s synechism of feeling and various treatments of Theory of Mind while exploring the influence of human/nature dualisms on sustainability, place attachment, common worlds pedagogy, emergence, and critical animal studies. It also explores the implications of plant electrical activity, plant intelligence, and plant “neurobiology” for possibilities of relational capacities in plants while even grappling with theories of animism to challenge the animate/inanimate divide. The result is an engaging, novel treatment of human-nature relational ontology that will encourage the reader to look at the world in a whole new way.
Download or read book Accidental Agents written by Martin Crowley and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2022-02-08 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the Anthropocene, the fact that human activity is enmeshed with the existence and actions of every kind of other being is inescapable. As a result, the planetary ecological crisis has brought forth an urgent need to rethink understandings of human action. One response holds that the transformations necessary to tackle today’s crises will emerge from the distinctive capacity of human beings to transcend their environment. Another school of thought calls for seeing action as composite, produced by distributed networks of human and nonhuman agents. Yet the first of these is open to charges of human exceptionalism, while the second, according to its critics, lacks effective political traction. Martin Crowley argues that a new conception of political agency is necessary to break this impasse. Engaging with thinkers such as Bruno Latour, Bernard Stiegler, and Catherine Malabou, Crowley proposes an original account of agency as both distributed and decisive. Challenging the prevailing view of agency as exclusively human, he explores how a politics that incorporates nonhuman agency can intervene in the real world, examining timely issues such as climate-related migration and digital-algorithmic politics. A major intervention into ongoing debates in posthumanism, political ecology, and political theory, Accidental Agents reshapes our understanding of political agency in and for a more-than-human world.
