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DIVAn ethnography of inellectual property, discussing the uses made of items of inellectual property by various cultural groups -- for purposes of identity, solidaritiy, resistance and so forth. /div
This book explores the diverse landscapes wherein women struggle for their personal and social identities and lives, between biology and culture, destiny and choice, shared and individual worlds, tradition and modernity. Their “peripheral lives” have “central meaning” (Chaudhary, this volume) in any society – and as such are approached as a primary subject in this book, as the chapters traverse ten different countries on three continents: North America (United States); Latin America (Brazil, Chile, Colombia); Asia (India); and Europe (United Kingdom, Ireland, Portugal, Finland, Estonia). Throughout these different places, women's lives are an interesting stage for observing the interaction between biology and culture (e.g. sex vs. gender; pregnancy and childbirth vs. transition to motherhood). The focus on the cultural variability of human experience opens the door for the search of commonalities so needed in psychological theorizing. Here, this search is directed by how cultural models of womanhood (and motherhood) constrain personal experiences, especially through developmental transitions. This book is, ultimately, an opportunity to approach women’s lives from the perspective of the women themselves, particularly making audible and explicit their voices and the axis of logic that structures their world. Undoubtedly, it is a valuable opportunity for women and men interested in understanding and constructing human experience inside better worlds.
Catastrophes and crises are exceptions. They are disruptions of order. In various ways and to different degrees, they change and subvert what we regard as normal. They may occur on a personal level in the form of traumatic or stressful situations, on a social level in the form of unstable political, financial or religious situations, or on a global level in the form of environmental states of emergency. The main assumption in this book is that, in contrast to the directness of any given catastrophe and its obvious physical, economical and psychological consequences our understanding of catastrophes and crises is shaped by our cultural imagination. No matter in which eruptive and traumatizing form we encounter them, our collective repertoire of symbolic forms, historical sensibilities, modes of representation, and patterns of imagination determine how we identify, analyze and deal with catastrophes and crises.This book presents a series of articles investigating how we address and interpret catastrophes and crises in film, literature, art and theory, ranging from Voltaire’s eighteenth-century Europe, haunted by revolutions and earthquakes, to the 1994 genocide in Rwanda to the bleak, prophetic landscapes of Cormac McCarthy.
The book discusses how culture simultaneously shapes and is shaped by the economy. Over the past few years, as the world has staggered from one financial crisis to another, the neat separation of economics and culture has been consistently challenged. To understand the current state of affairs, it has become increasingly necessary to understand the conjuncture that rules the production of value in economic systems, how money shapes social relations and affects discursive practices. By discussing the vocabulary, by understanding the rhetoric and interpreting the narratives, be it of crisis, austerity, growth, welfare, neo-liberalism or socialism, new modes of imaging the economic system may be made possible. The book is structured in four chapters dealing with theory and conjuncture (“Philosophies of Money”), with the visual arts and investment (“The Arts and Finance”), with literary representation and narrativity (“Literature and Money Matters”) and with the cognitive impact of fiduciary representation (“Cognitive Moneyscapes”). This collection analyses the process whereby a material icon invested with the symbolical power to rule social exchange becomes an explanatory narrative determining the way societies produce meaning.
Drawing on their own research as well as scientific literature including evolutionary biology, animal behavior, ecology, anthropology, psychology and neuroscience, two cetacean biologists submerge themselves in the unique environment in which whales and dolphins live. --Publisher's description.
This book brings together the work of historians and sociologists with perspectives from media studies, communication studies, cultural studies, and information studies to address the origins, practices, and possible futures of contemporary machine learning. From its foundations in 1950s and 1960s pattern recognition and neural network research to the modern-day social and technological dramas of DeepMind’s AlphaGo, predictive political forecasting, and the governmentality of extractive logistics, machine learning has become controversial precisely because of its increased embeddedness and agency in our everyday lives. How can we disentangle the history of machine learning from conventional histories of artificial intelligence? How can machinic agents’ capacity for novelty be theorized? Can reform initiatives for fairness and equity in AI and machine learning be realized, or are they doomed to cooptation and failure? And just what kind of “learning” does machine learning truly represent? We empirically address these questions and more to provide a baseline for future research. Chapter 2 is available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.
Engaging Art explores what it means to participate in the arts in contemporary society - from museum attendance to music downloading. Drawing on the perspectives of experts from diverse fields (including Princeton scholars Robert Wuthnow and Paul DiMaggio; Barry Schwartz, author of The Paradox of Choice; and MIT scholars Henry Jenkins and Mark Schuster), this volume analyzes key trends involving technology, audience demographics, religion, and the rise of "do-it-yourself" participatory culture. Commissioned by The Wallace Foundation and independently carried out by the Curb Center at Vanderbilt University, Engaging Art offers a new framework for understanding the momentous changes impacting America's cultural life over the past fifty years. This volume offers suggestive glimpses into the character and consequence of a new engagement with old-fashioned participation in the arts. The authors in this volume hint at a bright future for art and citizen art making. They argue that if we center a new commitment to arts participation in everyday art making, creativity, and quality of life, we will not only restore the lifelong pleasure of homemade art, but will likely seed a new generation of enthusiasts who will support America's signature nonprofit cultural institutions well into the future.
Questions that face dying individuals, their families, and the professionals that help them at the end of their lives are explored in this volume. The contributors help the reader to come to terms with issues of mortality complicated by the diversity of cultures within society.
George L. Mosse's extensive analysis of Nazi culture - ground-breaking upon its original publication in 1966 - is now offered to readers of a new generation. Selections from newspapers, novellas, plays, and diaries as well as the public pronouncements of Nazi leaders, churchmen, and professors describe National Socialism in practice and explore what it meant for the average German.