Download or read book The Technopolitics written by Rahul Pawar & Ishwar Singh and published by Pencil. This book was released on 2023-08-03 with total page 191 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Modern society has undergone a profound transformation as a result of the quick development of technology, which has changed the way we live, work, and govern ourselves. An unprecedented degree of interconnection has been brought about by the digital revolution, providing people and countries with new tools and opportunities. But with this extraordinary development comes the urgent need to critically assess the complex link between politics and technology-a relationship that we either ignore or are unable to completely appreciate.

Download or read book Rule of Experts written by Timothy Mitchell and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2002-11-18 with total page 436 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Publisher Description

Download or read book Entangled Geographies written by Gabrielle Hecht and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2011-04-04 with total page 348 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Investigations into how technologies became peculiar forms of politics in an expanded geography of the Cold War. The Cold War was not simply a duel of superpowers. It took place not just in Washington and Moscow but also in the social and political arenas of geographically far-flung countries emerging from colonial rule. Moreover, Cold War tensions were manifest not only in global political disputes but also in struggles over technology. Technological systems and expertise offered a powerful way to shape countries politically, economically, socially, and culturally. Entangled Geographies explores how Cold War politics, imperialism, and postcolonial nation building became entangled in technologies and considers the legacies of those entanglements for today's globalized world. The essays address such topics as the islands and atolls taken over for military and technological purposes by the supposedly non-imperial United States, apartheid-era South Africa's efforts to achieve international legitimacy as a nuclear nation, international technical assistance and Cold War politics, the Saudi irrigation system that spurred a Shi'i rebellion, and the momentary technopolitics of emergency as practiced by Medecins sans Frontières. The contributors to Entangled Geographies offer insights from the anthropology and history of development, from diplomatic history, and from science and technology studies. The book represents a unique synthesis of these three disciplines, providing new perspectives on the global Cold War.

Download or read book Transformative Media written by Sandra Jeppesen and published by UBC Press. This book was released on 2021-10-15 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1999, Seattle activists adopted cutting-edge livestream technology to cover protests against the World Trade Organization. The Indymedia network that emerged established the importance of alternative, anti-capitalist media for marginalized groups. Transformative Media explores subsequent developments as the anti-oppression practices of digitally facilitated movements and media activists began contributing to a nascent intersectional technopolitics: harnessing the transformative power of technologies for political purposes. Drawing on participatory research, Sandra Jeppesen investigates the complex, often contradictory digital and offline practices of grassroots media and social movement groups such as Indignados, #BlackLivesMatter, Idle No More, 2LGBTQ+, and #MeToo. This groundbreaking work examines how a broad array of anti-capitalists, women, Black, Indigenous, and people of colour, and 2LGBTQ+ people are contesting interlocking systems of capitalism, gender oppression, racism, colonialism, and heteronormativity. Transformative Media takes us behind the scenes of some of the world’s most exciting and controversial social movements.

Download or read book Technopolitics and the Making of Europe written by Nina Klimburg-Witjes and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2023-09-01 with total page 195 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the processes and practices of the securitization and de-securitization of European infrastructures and how political institutions interact with security and insecurity. Expert contributors address distinct areas, from border politics and biosecurity to health governance and law and border control enforcement, to examine the various ways in which infrastructures are envisioned, designed, negotiated and built. They explore how ‘infrastructuring’ contributes to emergent forms of European identity, integration, and statehood. The book will appeal to scholars and students of Science and Technology Studies, Political Sociology, Critical Security Studies, International Relations, European Integration Studies, Infrastructure Studies, or Critical Border and Migration Studies. The Introduction and the Afterword of this book are freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

Download or read book Democracy s Infrastructure written by Antina von Schnitzler and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2016-11-08 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the past decade, South Africa's "miracle transition" has been interrupted by waves of protests in relation to basic services such as water and electricity. Less visibly, the post-apartheid period has witnessed widespread illicit acts involving infrastructure, including the nonpayment of service charges, the bypassing of metering devices, and illegal connections to services. Democracy’s Infrastructure shows how such administrative links to the state became a central political terrain during the antiapartheid struggle and how this terrain persists in the post-apartheid present. Focusing on conflicts surrounding prepaid water meters, Antina von Schnitzler examines the techno-political forms through which democracy takes shape. Von Schnitzler explores a controversial project to install prepaid water meters in Soweto—one of many efforts to curb the nonpayment of service charges that began during the antiapartheid struggle—and she traces how infrastructure, payment, and technical procedures become sites where citizenship is mediated and contested. She follows engineers, utility officials, and local bureaucrats as they consider ways to prompt Sowetans to pay for water, and she shows how local residents and activists wrestle with the constraints imposed by meters. This investigation of democracy from the perspective of infrastructure reframes the conventional story of South Africa’s transition, foregrounding the less visible remainders of apartheid and challenging readers to think in more material terms about citizenship and activism in the postcolonial world. Democracy’s Infrastructure examines how seemingly mundane technological domains become charged territory for struggles over South Africa’s political transformation.

Download or read book Technology and Democracy Toward A Critical Theory of Digital Technologies Technopolitics and Technocapitalism written by Douglas Kellner and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2021-10-06 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As we enter a new millennium, it is clear that we are in the midst of one of the most dramatic technological revolutions in history that is changing everything from the ways that we work, communicate, participate in politics, and spend our leisure time. The technological revolution centers on computer, information, communication, and multimedia technologies, is often interpreted as the beginnings of a knowledge or information society, and therefore ascribes technologies a central role in every aspect of life. This Great Transformation poses tremendous challenges to critical social theorists, citizens, and educators to rethink their basic tenets, to deploy the media in creative and productive ways, and to restructure the workplace, social institutions, and schooling to respond constructively and progressively to the technological and social changes that we are now experiencing.

Download or read book Russian Energy Chains written by Margarita M. Balmaceda and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2021-05-11 with total page 421 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Russia’s use of its vast energy resources for leverage against post-Soviet states such as Ukraine is widely recognized as a threat. Yet we cannot understand this danger without also understanding the opportunity that Russian energy represents. From corruption-related profits to transportation-fee income to subsidized prices, many within these states have benefited by participating in Russian energy exports. To understand Russian energy power in the region, it is necessary to look at the entire value chain—including production, processing, transportation, and marketing—and at the full spectrum of domestic and external actors involved, from Gazprom to regional oligarchs to European Union regulators. This book follows Russia’s three largest fossil-fuel exports—natural gas, oil, and coal—from production in Siberia through transportation via Ukraine to final use in Germany in order to understand the tension between energy as threat and as opportunity. Margarita M. Balmaceda reveals how this dynamic has been a key driver of political development in post-Soviet states in the period between independence in 1991 and Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014. She analyzes how the physical characteristics of different types of energy, by shaping how they can be transported, distributed, and even stolen, affect how each is used—not only technically but also politically. Both a geopolitical travelogue of the journey of three fossil fuels across continents and an incisive analysis of technology’s role in fossil-fuel politics and economics, this book offers new ways of thinking about energy in Eurasia and beyond.

Download or read book Borders as Infrastructure written by Huub Dijstelbloem and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2021-08-17 with total page 285 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An investigation of borders as moving entities that influence our notions of territory, authority, sovereignty, and jurisdiction. In Borders as Infrastructure, Huub Dijstelbloem brings science and technology studies, as well as the philosophy of technology, to the study of borders and international human mobility. Taking Europe's borders as a point of departure, he shows how borders can transform and multiply and and how they can mark conflicts over international orders. Borders themselves are moving entities, he claims, and with them travel our notions of territory, authority, sovereignty, and jurisdiction. The philosophies of Bruno Latour and Peter Sloterdijk provide a framework for Dijstelbloem's discussion of the material and morphological nature of borders and border politics. Dijstelbloem offers detailed empirical investigations that focus on the so-called migrant crisis of 2014-2016 on the Greek Aegean Islands of Chios and Lesbos; the Europe surveillance system Eurosur; border patrols at sea; the rise of hotspots and "humanitarian borders"; the technopolitics of border control at Schiphol International Airport; and the countersurveillance by NGOs, activists, and artists who investigate infrastructural border violence. Throughout, Dijstelbloem explores technologies used in border control, including cameras, databases, fingerprinting, visual representations, fences, walls, and monitoring instruments. Borders can turn places, routes, and territories into "zones of death." Dijstelbloem concludes that Europe's current relationship with borders renders borders--and Europe itself--an "extreme infrastructure" obsessed with boundaries and limits.

Download or read book Techno Politics in Presidential Campaigning written by John Allen Hendricks and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-06-03 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume examines the use of new media and technologies to reach voters in the 2008 US Presidential campaigns, and the role these tactics played in attracting new voters and communicating with the electorate. Chapters focus on how the technologies were used by candidates, the press, and voters.

Download or read book Disco Sour written by Giuseppe Porcaro and published by Unbound Publishing. This book was released on 2018-05-24 with total page 172 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A politician addicted to dating apps embarks on an existential odyssey to save democracy from being swiped away. In the aftermath of a continental civil-war, nation-states have collapsed, the European UnionTM holds on, preventing anarchy. Bastian Balthazar Bux is a leading member of The Federation®, the European network of civil society and local governments. Bastian has just been unexpectedly dumped through an app, the BreakupShopTM service. Heavy hearted, he just wants to drink, get on with work and forget his romantic woes. However, he discovers that Nathan Ziggy Zukowsky is planning to sell Plebiscitum®, a dating-style app that is meant to replace elections with a simple swipe, at the same conference he is invited to attend in Chile. Haunted by the ghosts of his recent relationship, he finds himself without his all-important Morph® phone, just a few hours before embarking on his trip to try to save democracy. Will he make it to his conference on the other side of the world? Will he stop Zukowsky from selling his app? And will he ever find a way to deal with his breakup?

Download or read book Networks Movements and Technopolitics in Latin America written by Francisco Sierra Caballero and published by Springer. This book was released on 2017-11-09 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This edited collection presents original and compelling research about contemporary experiences of Latin American movements and politics in several countries. The book proposes a theoretical framework that conceptualises different mediation processes that emerge between cyberdemocracy and the emancipation practices of new social movements. Additionally, this volume presents some Latin American practices and experiences that are autonomously and by using self-management–creating other identities and social spaces on the margins of and against the neoliberal system through the use of digital technology. This book will be of great interest to scholars of media and social movements studies as well as of contemporary politics.

Download or read book High Speed Dreams written by Erik M. Conway and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2005 with total page 404 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In High-Speed Dreams, Erik M. Conway constructs an insightful history that focuses primarily on the political and commercial factors responsible for the rise and fall of American supersonic transport research programs. Conway charts commercial supersonic research efforts through the changing relationships between international and domestic politicians, military/NASA contractors, private investors, and environmentalists. He documents post-World War II efforts at the National Advisory Committee on Aeronautics and the Defense Department to generate supersonic flight technologies, the attempts to commercialize these technologies by Britain and the United States during the 1950s and 1960s, environmental campaigns against SST technology in the 1970s, and subsequent attempts to revitalize supersonic technology at the end of the century. High-Speed Dreams is a sophisticated study of politics, economics, nationalism, and the global pursuit of progress. Historians, along with participants in current aerospace research programs, will gain valuable perspective on the interaction of politics and technology.

Download or read book The Atomic Archipelago written by Davide Orsini and published by University of Pittsburgh Press. This book was released on 2022-05-24 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1972, the US Navy installed a base for nuclear submarines in the Archipelago of La Maddalena off the northeastern shore of Sardinia, Italy. In response, Italy established a radiation surveillance program to monitor the impact of the base on the environment and public health. In the first systematic study of nuclear expertise in Italy, Davide Orsini focuses on the ensuing technopolitical disputes concerning the role and safety of US nuclear submarines in the Mediterranean Sea from the Cold War period to the closure of the naval base in 2008. His book follows the struggles of different groups—including local residents of the archipelago, US Navy personnel, local administrators, Italian experts, and politicians—to define nuclear submarines as either imperceptible threats, much like radiocontamination, or efficient machines at the service of liberty and freedom. Unlike inland nuclear power plants, vividly present and visible with their tall cooling towers and reactor containers, the mobility and invisibility of submarines contributed to an ambivalence about their nature, perpetuating the idea of nuclear exceptionalism. In Italy, they symbolized objects in constant motion, easily removable at the first sign of potential harm. Orsini demonstrates how these mobile sources of hazard posed special challenges for both expert assessments and public understandings of risk, and in contexts outside the Anglo-Saxon world, where unique social power dynamics held sway over the outcome of technopolitical controversies.

Download or read book The Politics of Technology in Africa written by Iginio Gagliardone and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2016-11-10 with total page 191 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Influencing Policy without Influencing Technology

Download or read book Eskom written by Sylvy Jaglin and published by Juta and Company (Pty) Ltd. This book was released on 2016-08-16 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Africa’s leading producer of electricity, Eskom Holdings SOC Ltd, is also a vertically integrated monopoly, owned by the South African state. This national champion was shaken in 2008, when it was obliged to introduce ‘load shedding’, or rolling blackouts, and again in late 2014. Trying to understand how and why one of the iconic pillars of South African state capitalism is now in distress, the authors of this book argue that the so-called electricity crisis is in fact a public monopoly crisis. Moving beyond technical aspects, they explore the relationship between state power and Eskom before, during and after apartheid. From this perspective, they suggest that the current technical and financial troubles of this public utility are illustrative of the weakening of its technopolitical regime, of how national institutions have governed Eskom’s technological development, and of the pursuit of political goals in the production of electrical power. Without a clear industrial strategy during the 2000s, Eskom became a powerful tool of Broad-Black Economic Empowerment as well as a neopatrimonial system which generates profits captured by the ruling party. As a result, crisis in Eskom shakes the whole political edifice. Inefficient and its finances increasingly under scrutiny, this state-owned enterprise’s existence as a monopolistic public utility is regularly a subject of debate. The authors discuss the ambivalent role of Eskom in the national energy transition policy and whether solutions point in the direction of de-integrating this public monopoly and allowing its current technopolitical regime to enter a planned or natural decline.

Download or read book The Radiance of France new edition written by Gabrielle Hecht and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2009-07-31 with total page 497 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How it happened that technological prowess and national glory (or “radiance,” which also means “radiation” in French) became synonymous in France as nowhere else. In the aftermath of World War II, as France sought a distinctive role for itself in the modern, postcolonial world, the nation and its leaders enthusiastically embraced large technological projects in general and nuclear power in particular. The Radiance of France asks how it happened that technological prowess and national glory (or “radiance,” which also means “radiation” in French) became synonymous in France as nowhere else. To answer this question, Gabrielle Hecht has forged an innovative combination of technology studies and cultural and political history in a book that, as Michel Callon writes in the new foreword to this edition, “not only sheds new light on the role of technology in the construction of national identities” but is also “a seminal contribution to the history of contemporary France.” Proposing the concept of technopolitical regime as a way to analyze the social, political, cultural, and technological dynamics among engineering elites, unionized workers, and rural communities, Hecht shows how the history of France's first generation of nuclear reactors is also a history of the multiple meanings of nationalism, from the postwar period (and France's desire for post-Vichy redemption) to 1969 and the adoption of a “Frenchified” American design. This paperback edition of Hecht's groundbreaking book includes both Callon's foreword and an afterword by the author in which she brings the story up to date, and reflects on such recent developments as the 2007 French presidential election, the promotion of nuclear power as the solution to climate change, and France's aggressive exporting of nuclear technology.