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Thinking Infrastructures brings together interdisciplinary research on informational infrastructures to show how thinking, thought, and cognition as in ideas/rationalities and the practice/activity of thinking are inseparable from infrastructures.
Investigates the systems of infrastructure that sustain the world and the cultures of historical periods, following various elements, from electricity and pavement to water and waste disposal, back to their origins and people who operate them.
Post-Socialist Urban Infrastructures critically elaborates on often forgotten, but some of the most essential, aspects of contemporary urban life, namely infrastructures, and links them to a discussion of post-socialist transformation. As the skeletons of cities, infrastructures capture the ways in which urban environments are assembled and urban lives unfold. Focusing on post-socialist cities, marked by neoliberalisation, polarisation and hybridity, this book offers new and enriching perspectives on urban infrastructures by centering on the often marginalised aspects of urban research—transport, green spaces, and water and heating provision. Featuring cases from West and East alike, the book covers examples from Azerbaijan, Bulgaria, Serbia, Croatia, Germany, Russia, Georgia, Lithuania, Poland, the Czech Republic, Tajikistan, and India. It provides original insights into the infrastructural back end of post-socialist cities for scholars, planners and activists interested in urban geography, cultural and social anthropology, and urban studies.
Innovative and the first of its kind, this informative and multidisciplinary book explores the socio-cultural significance inherent in event infrastructures. While mainstream event management literature addresses event infrastructures mainly through its operational relevance, this carefully compiled edited volume takes infrastructures as an analytical point in respect to its social, political, economic and cultural potential of the study of events. Borrowing from the ongoing social scientific debates on the geography, sociology and anthropology of infrastructures, critical questions are posed in relation to the event contexts. With references to events in Argentina, Malawi, Spain and the UK, among others, the volume combines an international perspective with a highly relevant subject for contemporary event management education. By bringing together theoretical as well as empirical readings on the question of event infrastructures from a critical point of view, the debates are relevant to practitioners and researchers as well as undergraduate and postgraduate students in the field of events, leisure, tourism, anthropology, sociology, geography and urban planning – among others.
Contributing towards a thriving research area, this comprehensive Handbook presents a broad discussion of infrastructure as social phenomena. It compiles diverse perspectives to delineate the current ‘infrastructural turn’ and assess policy and research challenges relating to contemporary forms of infrastructural development.
This book covers practical and philosophical aspects of Engineering, paying special attention to the social impacts of emerging technologies. Some fundamentals of philosophy of technology are introduced followed by social, economic, and environmental discussion and implications in different disciplines. Each chapter provides insights on the responsibilities involved in the design of engineering projects. The examples presented combine concepts about the impacts of Engineering in society at the same time that incorporates new technological models, yielding an innovative approach about the topics.
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.
Knowledge is a result of never-ending processes of circulation. This accessible volume is the first comprehensive multidisciplinary work to explore these processes through the perspective of scholars working outside of Anglo-American paradigms. Through a variety of literature reviews, examples of recent research and in-depth case studies, the chapters demonstrate that the analysis of knowledge circulation requires a series of ontological and epistemic commitments that impact its conceptualisation and methodologies. Bringing diverse viewpoints from across the globe and from a range of disciplines, including anthropology, economics, history, political science, sociology and Science & Technology Studies (STS), this wide-ranging and thought-provoking collection offers a broad and cutting-edge overview of outstanding research on academic knowledge circulation. The book is structured in seven sections: (i) key concepts in studying the circulation of academic knowledge; (ii) spaces and actors of circulation; (iii) academic media and knowledge circulation; (iv) the political economy of academic knowledge circulation; (v) the geographies, geopolitics and historical legacies of the global circulation of academic knowledge; (vi) the relationships between academic and extra-academic knowledges; and (vii) methodological approaches to studying the circulation of academic knowledge. This handbook will be essential reading for academics, researchers and postgraduate researchers in the humanities and social sciences interested in the circulation of knowledge.
A cultural history of the shipping container as a crucible of globalization and a cultural paradigm. We live in a world organized around the container. Standardized twenty- and forty-foot shipping containers carry material goods across oceans and over land; provide shelter, office space, and storage capacity; inspire films, novels, metaphors, and paradigms. Today, TEU (Twenty Foot Equivalent Unit, the official measurement for shipping containers) has become something like a global currency. A container ship, sailing under the flag of one country but owned by a corporation headquartered in another, carrying auto parts from Japan, frozen fish from Vietnam, and rubber ducks from China, offers a vivid representation of the increasing, world-is-flat globalization of the international economy. In The Container Principle, Alexander Klose investigates the principle of the container and its effect on the way we live and think. Klose explores a series of “container situations” in their historical, political, and cultural contexts. He examines the container as a time capsule, sometimes breaking loose and washing up onshore to display an inventory of artifacts of our culture. He explains the “Matryoshka principle,” explores the history of land-water transport, and charts the three phases of container history. He examines the rise of logistics, the containerization of computing in the form of modularization and standardization, the architecture of container-like housing (citing both Le Corbusier and Malvina Reynolds's “Little Boxes”), and a range of artistic projects inspired by containers. Containerization, spreading from physical storage to organizational metaphors, Klose argues, signals a change in the fundamental order of thinking and things. It has become a principle.
From U.S.-Mexico border walls to Flint's poisoned pipes, there is a new urgency to the politics of infrastructure. Roads, electricity lines, water pipes, and oil installations promise to distribute the resources necessary for everyday life. Yet an attention to their ongoing processes also reveals how infrastructures are made with fragile and often violent relations among people, materials, and institutions. While infrastructures promise modernity and development, their breakdowns and absences reveal the underbelly of progress, liberal equality, and economic growth. This tension, between aspiration and failure, makes infrastructure a productive location for social theory. Contributing to the everyday lives of infrastructure across four continents, some of the leading anthropologists of infrastructure demonstrate in The Promise of Infrastructure how these more-than-human assemblages made over more-than-human lifetimes offer new opportunities to theorize time, politics, and promise in the contemporary moment. A School for Advanced Research Advanced Seminar Contributors. Nikhil Anand, Hannah Appel, Geoffrey C. Bowker, Dominic Boyer, Akhil Gupta, Penny Harvey, Brian Larkin, Christina Schwenkel, Antina von Schnitzler