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This book explores the phenomenon of the story paper, the meanings and values children took from their reading, and the responses of adults to their reading choices. It argues for the revaluing of the story paper in the inter-war years, giving the genre a pivotal role in the development of children's literature.

This book brings together the work of scholars and writer-practitioners of psychoanalysis to consider the legacy of two of Sigmund Freud's most important metapsychological papers:'On Narcissism: An Introduction'(1914) and'Mourning and Melancholia'(1917 [1915]). These twin papers, conceived in the context of unprecedented social and political turmoil, mark a point in Freud's metapsychological project wherein the themes of loss and of psychic violence were becoming incontrovertible facts in the story of subject formation. Taking as their concern the difficulty of setting apart the ‘inner'and the ‘outer'worlds, as well as the difficulty of preserving an image of the coherently boundaried subject, the psychoanalytic frameworks of narcissism and melancholia provide the background coordinates for the volume's contributors to analyse contemporary subjectivities in new psychosocial contexts. This collection will be of great interest to all scholars and practitioners of psychoanalysis and the psychotherapies, social and cultural theory, gender and sexuality studies, politics, and psychosocial studies.

This book takes the contemporary moment of digital health infrastructuring in Ghana as a starting point to examine the genealogies of oral, paper-based and digital forms of knowledge production about health. In view of this multiplicity of forms, the chapters adopt a broad definition of health data that encompasses databases, statistics as well as oral and written records and reports about health. In addition to close historiographic insights into the interactions of indigenous and colonial ways of organising knowledge around health, the chapters explore contemporary ways in which medical professionals are mobilized or potentially demobilized by the standards, methods and calculative devices that accompany the increasing production of health data. The authors show that the contemporary hype around the datafication of health is neither new nor exceptional, but instead needs to be read in broader historical perspective. Through its unique combination of historical, sociological and ethnographic methods, the book shows that the regulation and standardization of health produces both mobilizations and demobilizations, as well as appropriations and resistances.

This book fills a gap in sociological theory surrounding how we engage with digital maps like Google Maps, Bing Maps, and OpenStreetMap (OSM). It explains how they feature in everyday life and with what social consequences. To do so, the book walks through examples of how digital maps shape social practices, from choosing which home to buy (landed capital acquisition), through to selecting routes between places. The book first provides a socio-technical background to digital maps and their development as progeny of the Internet and web rather than direct successors to paper-based ones. It then charts the evolution of theory about map use from its origin in academic cartography to contemporary thought, introducing concepts from systems-based communication models, semiotics, cognitive-behaviorism, critical cartography, and critical data and platform studies. With background concepts in place, the book moves on to develop a particular framework for analysing digital media use. Combining digital sociology and practice theory, the book works through empirical examples to cumulatively develop a new sociological theory on the social consequences of digital maps. The book argues that we defer to digital maps knowledgeably as rough guides, adopting a Bayesian logic - albeit with an awareness of their potential for error. As a result, decisions over choice of place and route - the mobility of people and things in space - become anchored within people's deferral to digital maps. By extension, so do senses of place, sense of security, and the performance of social positions.

This edited book analyses current trends in science communication and gathers research on practices related to the construction of digital identity and visibility, emerging conflicts related to the public availability and appropriation of scientific culture, and ways of validating and disseminating scientific knowledge in new digital contexts. Drawing on a selection of papers presented in the InterGedi Conference (Zaragoza, December 2021), the main goal of the volume is to identify and explore emerging professional practices and challenges in the digital communication of science through innovative multimodal genres. This book will be of interest to postgraduates, doctoral students, practitioners and researchers in the fields of discourse analysis, sociolinguistics, digital media, multimodality and communication studies.

This book analyzes future directions in the study of expertise and experience with the aim of engendering more critical discourse on the general discipline of science and technology studies. In 2002, Collins and Evans published an article entitled “The Third Wave of Science Studies,” suggesting that the future of science and technology studies would be to engage in “Studies in Expertise and Experience.” In their view, scientific expertise in legal and policy settings should reflect a consensus of formally-trained scientists and citizens with experience in the relevant field (but not “ordinary” citizens). The Third Wave has garnered attention in journals and in international workshops, where scholars delivered papers explicating the theoretical foundations and practical applications of the Third Wave. This book arose out of those workshops, and is the next step in the popularization of the Third Wave. The chapters address the novel concept of interactional experts, the useof imitation games, appropriating scientific expertise in law and policy settings, and recent theoretical developments in the Third Wave.

This volume explores cultural innovation and transformation as revealed through the emergence of new media genres. New media have enabled what impresses most observers as a dizzying proliferation of new forms of communicative interaction and cultural production, provoking multimodal experimentation, and artistic and entrepreneurial innovation. Working with the concept of genre, scholars in multiple fields have begun to explore these processes of emergence, innovation, and stabilization. Genre has thus become newly important in game studies, library and information science, film and media studies, applied linguistics, rhetoric, literature, and elsewhere. Understood as social recognitions that embed histories, ideologies, and contradictions, genres function as recurrent social actions, helping to constitute culture. Because genres are dynamic sites of tension between stability and change, they are also sites of inventive potential. Emerging Genres in New Media Environments brings together compelling papers from scholars in Brazil, Canada, England, and the United States to illustrate how this inventive potential has been harnessed around the world.

Bringing together a selection of some of the author's key papers on language and gender, this book provides an overview of the development of language and gender studies over the last 30 years, with particular emphasis on conversational data and on single sex friendship groups.

'This book is based on the papers presented at the Conference'Mechanisms of Power,'which took place in Copenhagen from 29 April to 1 May 1998'--P. ix.

Politics and Practices of the Ethnographies of Biomedicine and STEM: Among White Coats collects critical examinations of the politics, positionality, and epistemological and methodological issues of doing ethnography in a number of locales across the globe and in fields including computer science, astronomy, mining, biology, and medicine. The book captures a wide breadth of ethnographic case studies conducted by scholars at different stages of their careers, with various geographical backgrounds, and working across different settings and regions of the world, demonstrating the unfolding of overlapping concerns in unique ways. ‘Among White Coats'is the first systematic and critical examination of the politics and epistemology of doing ethnography in biomedicine and STEM, adding to the extensive production of studies based on the ethnography of medicine and ethnography of science, as well as the ongoing debate on the foundation of ethnography. The book is geared toward academics and research students from different disciplinary backgrounds. It is a resource useful not only for students and Ph.D. candidates but also for expert ethnographers, presenting the most recent debates on ethnography and knowledge production in the STEM and biomedical fields. The book is partly a response to the growing awareness of the increasingly pertinent objective for ethnographers to reflect on their positionalities in their writing. Thus, this book offers a reflexive guide to thinking through the political and practical aspects of ethnographic practice.

This book will make the case for the introduction of a universal basic income (UBI). The structural logic of the digital economy as presently constituted widens inequality and, through its use of automation for increasingly complex, as well as mundane, tasks, threatens jobs. The book will investigate the extent of this disruption to traditional labour markets and of individual livelihoods, and argue that alternative means of supporting people financially, like UBI, can mitigate the digital economy's most baleful impacts. The book will also highlight the positive social and environmental benefits that would accrue from the introduction of UBI, as unconditional financial support would reduce workers'anxiety in insecure labour markets, and the expending of valuable resources would be lessened if energy consumption was determined by society's needs rather than by the requirements of labour markets tasked primarily with maximising employment. An explanation as to why arguments against its introduction on the grounds of cost and its supposed encouraging of idleness, are, while superficially compelling, ultimately without foundation, will form the centrepiece of the concluding political argument for UBI.

This book provides a philosophical investigation of technology in Africa, articulating conceptual foundations and analyses rooted in African worldviews and communitarian values. It aims to spur discourse and understanding of how technology can be justly shaped for human advancement in Africa. Yamikani Ndasauka highlights the need to understand African conceptions of existence, ethics, and values as foundations for envisioning more humanistic technological applications. A historical contextualisation traces the layered origins of African technology philosophy in indigenous innovation, resistant adaptation of external systems, and creative fusion of endogenous and exogenous knowledge. The book develops African frameworks to assess and design technology in accord with human dignity and collective advancement.

This volume examines the role of culture in developing social, cultural and political discourses of HIV/AIDS from a contemporary viewpoint. In doing so, the memory of HIV/AIDS is a powerful tool to examine representations of the past and connect them with future debates. This reassessment of HIV/AIDS explores the most appropriate way to come to terms with a past that involved a negative, stigmatised and marginalised representation. Therefore, remembering plays a key role in generating collective memory, which allows for the exchange of mnemonic content between individual minds, creates discourses on memory and commemoration, and disseminates versions of the past that may affect the representation of HIV/AIDS in the future. Indeed, rewriting about the past also means assessing our responsibility towards the present and the potential of transmission to future generations, especially in times of pandemics.

This open access book draws on the work of Deleuze and Guattari alongside Lacan and Freud to offer a radical psychosocial survey of the status of anxiety. Taking a multidisciplinary approach, the book examines key issues in contemporary diagnosis and points towards possibilities for forging a more creative clinic. Departing from a feminist, non-Oedipal positioning towards psychoanalytic texts, the author invites art theory, medical humanities and philosophy into a conversation that seeks to answer the question: What can anxiety do? Here, Ana Minozzo explores the possibilities of an encounter with the Real as a sphere of excessive affect in psychoanalysis, and terms this meeting a ‘vibration'. Situating this enquiry within the art practice of Lygia Clark, the book utilises vibration as a conceptual artifice when considering affects, their ethical horizons and a psychoanalytic possibility for creating new ways of living. This book offers exciting new perspective on anxiety for students, clinical trainees, art and humanities researchers and practitioners and those interested in psychoanalytic ideas in general.

Madness, Psychiatry, and Empire in Postcolonial Literature provides a comparatist interrogation of empire through archives of history, science, and literature. The book analyzes Aimé Césaire's Discourse on Colonialism to shed light on Césaire's critique of psychological and medical discourses of the colonized's mind. The book argues that the discourse of psychiatry, psychology, and psychoanalysis has erased the context of power in global histories of empire. Through the book's chapters, Chi analyzes Lu Xun's “A Madman's Diary,” Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, and Tsitsi Dangarembga's Nervous Conditions to assert that the misapprehension of madness should not automatically be accepted as the history of an isolated Western culture but rather that of the history of imperialism—a globalizing process that silences alternative cultural conceptions of the mind, of madness, and of behavior, as well as different interpretations of madness.

This Open Access book offers a novel perspective on the role of quantification in the making of education utopias through an analysis of expert knowledge and its producers. Drawing on empirical findings from the European Research Council funded project ‘International Organisations and the Rise of a Global Metrological Field'(METRO, 2017-2022), Education, Quantification and Utopia focuses on the ways that metrological realism has constructed a well-supported epistemic infrastructure, built on relationships and practices that go beyond the mere objectivity and reliability of numerical evidence. The book's chapters outline how the production of new forms of education expertise have led to ideational and institutional interdependencies, and ultimately the making of an intricate, fragmented and opaque knowledge and governance web.

This book argues for the significance of contagious disease in critical and biographical assessment of Charlotte Brontë's work. Waugh argues that contagion, infection, and quarantining strategies are central themes in Jane Eyre (1847), Shirley (1849), and Villette (1853). This book establishes the ways in which Charlotte Brontë was closely engaged with the political and social contexts in which she wrote, extending this to the representation and metaphorical import of illness in Brontë's novels. Waugh also posits that although miasmatic theories are often assumed to have been entirely in the ascendant in the late 1840s, the relationship between miasma and contagion was a complex one and contagion in fact remained a crucial way for Charlotte Brontë to represent disease itself, as well as to explore the relationships between the individual and social, political, and cultural contexts. Contagion and its metaphors are central to Charlotte Brontë's construction of subjectivity and of the responsibilities of the individual and the group.

This books offers a comprehensive overview of the possible effects of disasters or crisis situations on civil protections which have been challenged and tested during these scenarios. The book provides a comprehensive discussion on security and threats, describes the examples of crisis situations faced by people across regions of Africa, Asia, and Europe: the border ethnicity conflict experienced by the Rwandan refugees in Uganda, the impact of terrorism on critical infrastructure in Somalia, the Covid 19 pandemic impact on the Pakistani, and finally the pollution of the Oder Basin. The analyses and findings of this work provides a framework to improve the entities of the civil protection system, its subsystems, institutions and agencies; they are subjects of examination to improve their command, control and operational capacities during disasters. The challenges described in the book are of different nature and have arisen from a variety of global settings, yet they all implemented effective and more adaptive, cooperative methods for civil protection on a national and international level.

This book provides a fully-fledged exploration of science and technology studies (STS) perspective applied to algorithms developed to support care processes. By concentrating on algorithmic technologies for supporting processes of social and health care, the book intersects topics connected to technoscientific innovation and specifically digital transformation for health care. By offering different attempts of deconstructing algorithmic technologies, the book provides a landmark reference for those interested in undertaking research focused on areas connected to algorithmic decision-making for health care. The book will be an invaluable reference for scholars interested in the STS debate and related fields (e.g.,human–computer interaction, computer supported cooperative work, participatory design, and sociology of health and medicine). This book responds to a growing interest in the application of algorithms'to local and national care systems. The book balances theoretical and empirical analysis bringing together experienced and early-career scholars. This book will be of interest to researchers in STS as well as healthcare professionals and managers as some of the topics covered help to critically reconsider some facets of planning through algorithmic technologies supporting the practice of healthcare and decision-making.

This open access book engages with the difficulties of delivering community energy in practice, building on practical experiences in Ethiopia, Malawi, and Mozambique. In these countries, where many people lack access to electricity, community energy is an alternative to advance universal energy access. This book argues that, besides providing access, community energy is essential for achieving justice and resilience in sustainable energy transitions. Community energy combines off-grid infrastructures with innovative forms of governance to incorporate the perspectives of beneficiaries in the generation and distribution of electricity. Community energy has multiple benefits for communities, such as facilitating the adoption of renewable technologies, providing energy access where it is lacking, and building resilience. They also offer societal benefits beyond beneficiary communities, such as providing additional capacity to existing grids, delivering off-grid services where the grid is absent, and bridging on-grid and off-grid systems. Despite its promises, however, the adoption of community energy has been slow. This book presents a feminist-informed perspective on community energy to advance energy justice that puts disadvantaged communities at the centre of sustainable energy transitions. It also explores the room for manoeuvre within existing regulatory systems, supply chains, and delivery systems to facilitate its development. By engaging with existing experiences in community energy, the book demonstrates the potential of communities to gain control over their energy needs and resources and argues for the need to develop a wide range of transdisciplinary skills among policymakers, technicians and communities to deliver a just energy transition.

This book addresses the most suggestive themes of transhumanism and critical posthumanism by placing them in dialogue with classic problems of metaphysics, and with some great thinkers of the past (Bruno, Spinoza, and above all Leibniz). The main purpose of this comparison is to invite transhumanists and critical posthumanists to consider a highly complex problematic tradition rooted in the history of philosophy. This study also makes use of examples drawn from the history of mythology, angelology, and mysticism. At the same time, the book promotes dialogue between scholars of classical metaphysics and philosophy of religion, and the potential metaphysical/spiritual theories developed independently by transhumanist and posthumanist thinkers within an anti-dualist and naturalistic philosophical framework. The goal is to ‘enhance'contemporary transhumanism and posthumanism by promoting the need to safeguard intelligence as a principle, without falling into the trap of a violent and egotistic metaphysics.

This transdisciplinary book investigates the profound repercussions of living in a post-truth world in which'alternative facts'and post-truth knowledge claims, often bordering on the absurd, have replaced the real in the collective imagination of millions of people around the planet. Through discussions on climate change denial, the anti-vaccination movement, the January 6th Insurrection and the Russia-Ukraine War, this study explores the gravity of the current'infodemic,'or the increasing inability of a large segment of the population to distinguish between reality and misrepresentation, and the destabilizing impact this infodemic has on democratic models of governance around the globe, coinciding with the rise of autocratic forms of populism.

This handbook reviews the extant literature on the most important issues in health and science journalism, with a focus on summarizing the relevant research and identifying key questions that are yet to be answered. It explores challenges and best practices in health and science reporting, formats and audiences, key topics such as climate change, pandemics and space science, and the ethics and political impacts of science and health journalist practice. With numerous international contributions, it provides a comprehensive overview of an emerging area of journalism studies and science communication.

This book delves into the significant and timely intersection of cultural heritage, neurodiversity, and smart museums, exploring how various immersive techniques can create more inclusive and engaging heritage experiences for neurodiverse audiences. By focusing on these three aspects, the book aims to contribute significantly to the fields of cultural heritage, neuro-inclusivity, and smart museums, offering practical solutions and examples for heritage professionals and researchers. The book highlights the importance of preserving and enhancing cultural heritage by incorporating immersive technologies and inclusive practices that cater to the needs of neurodiverse audiences. It emphasizes the need for museums and heritage sites to be more inclusive and accessible for neurodivergent individuals, showcasing best practices and innovative techniques to engage this audience effectively.

This open access handbook examines the phenomenon of South-South migration and its relationship to inequality in the Global South, where at least a third of all international migration takes place. Drawing on contributions from nearly 70 leading migration scholars, mainly from the Global South, the handbook challenges dominant conceptualisations of migration, offering new perspectives and insights that can inform theoretical and policy understandings and unlock migration's development potential. The handbook is divided into four parts, each highlighting often overlooked mobility patterns within and between regions of the Global South, as well as the inequalities faced by those who move. Key cross-cutting themes include gender, race, poverty and income inequality, migration decision making, intermediaries, remittances, technology, climate change, food security and migration governance. The handbook is an indispensable resource on South-South migration and inequality for academics, researchers, postgraduates and development practitioners.

This open access book focuses on the energy sector and will make a significant contribution to its continued evolution. For many years, the energy sector has been missing a raison d'etre and now finally there are increased calls for that to be justice. Hence, this book will develop the concept of energy justice and how it needs to be formalised in a new ‘social contract'with all stakeholders in society. The focus will be on improving legal systems at local, national and international levels while ensuring that justice is a core issue within energy law, the legal system and more broadly in society.

This open access book explores what makes women decide to pursue a career in male-dominated fields such as information technology (IT). It reveals how women experience gendered stereotypes but also how they bypass, negotiate, and challenge such stereotypes, reconstructing gender-technology relations in the process. Using the example of Norway to illuminate this challenge in Western countries, the book includes a discussion of the “gender equality paradox”, where gender equality exists in parallel with gender segregation in fields such as IT. The discussion illustrates how the norm of gender equality in some cases hinders rather than promotes efforts to increase women's participation in technology-related roles.

This open access book takes a human-focused multidisciplinary look at the ways in which autonomous technology shapes experience, affecting human lives and ways of working in settings ranging from the arts, design, and service to maritime and industry. The book focuses on the humane, observing how technology can be designed and implemented in an ethical, human-centered way. Chapters in this book highlight factors that impinge on the humane and ethical, such as challenging questions of intellectual property rights, roles of humans, biases, and the uptake of other deviant human traits. Through delving into a range of dimensions and contexts from culture, the arts and design, to service, heavy industry and maritime, the contributors demonstrate that artificial intelligence and its related autonomous systems need to be understood holistically, as a system of systems, that should be working for the benefit of human present and future.

Over the past decades, psychosocial studies has demonstrated its strengths and influence across diverse sites of theory and practice; it continues to grow as an area of transdisciplinary research that dialogues with psychoanalysis, sociology, critical psychology, cultural studies, gender and sexuality studies, and postcolonial studies. The Palgrave Handbook of Psychosocial Studies is the first Major Reference Work to explore the history and depth of the field and offer a critical evaluation of contemporary theories, empirical methods and practices of psychosocial studies. With 50 chapters, this state-of-the-art collection:· reflects back on texts that have influenced the development of psychosocial studies from a 2020s perspective· explores current major topics with evaluative reviews· identifies newly emerging areas ofenquiry · features a wide range of international psychosocial voices. Published chapters can be read and downloaded individually online: https://link.springer.com/referencework/10.1007/978-3-030-61510-9 The Palgrave Handbook of Psychosocial Studies is unique in covering a wide range of psychosocial topics and in being written accessibly from many different perspectives. It will appeal to students, scholars and practitioner-researchers alike.

This book introduces the idea of accidental collectives: the grouping of people that occurs as a by-product of the automated work of computers. Software has a growing influence in our lives automating and optimising mundane, time-consuming and repetitive tasks. In doing this, groups of people are automatically created as the result of classification and data analysis. Once grouped by the invisible agency of software, people interact and establish new relationships, generating new collectives and communities. With the support of case studies and real-life examples, this work explores the accidental nature of the generation of new social groups and questions the role of software in social interactions.

This handbook fills a substantial gap in the international academic literature on animation at large, on music studies, and on the aural dimensions of Japanese animation more specifically. It offers a unique contribution at the intersection between music and popular culture studies on the one hand, and research on Japanese animated productions (often called ‘anime') as popular art forms and formats of entertainment, on the other. The book is designed as a reference work consisting of an organic sequence of theory-grounded essays on the development of music, sounds, and voices in Japanese animation for cinema and television since the 1930s. Each chapter deals with a phase of this history, focusing on composers and performers, films, series, and genres used in the soundtracks for animations made in Japan. The chapters also offer valuable interviews with prominent figures of music in Japanese animation, as well as chapter boxes clarifying specific aspects.

This collection explores the evolution of the commercial space industry from the beginning of the space age through the early twenty-first century. Today, the space industry is taking on an increased leadership and innovation role in both space access and exploration. The growth of commercial space over the past decades offers a potential new paradigm for space exploration – one in which industry transitions from supplier to partner. However, many questions remain. This book seeks to bring to light these questions, which span from the most seemingly consequential: how will humanity explore the Moon and Mars? - to the most basic: what is commercial space? To further develop the historical context of commercial space, and thereby better inform decision-making at NASA in the future, this volume examines a broad range of questions related to the history of commercial space operations, including but not limited to: how has the concept of ‘commercial space'evolved in different fields and disciplines? What have been the major events and milestones in the emergence and evolution of commercial space activities in the USA and internationally? How has the US Government assisted or impeded the emergence and evolution of commercial space activities? Providing contributions from a range of different disciplines and backgrounds, the authors of this volume offer valuable insights for scholars researching the history of space and space policy, as well as decision-makers working at NASA or within the wider space industry.

The second edition offers an essential update to the foundational first edition, The Disabled Body in Contemporary Art. Featuring updated chapters and case studies, this second edition will not only expand on the first edition but will bring a new focus to contemporary disabled artists and their embodied, multimedia work.

This book provides the first modern, in-depth analysis of Percy Bysshe Shelley's engagement with the phenomenon of death. It argues that, for Shelley, this most nebulous of realities represents, first and foremost, possibility: Shelley's poetic writings on death are both numerous and varied, presenting his reader, with differing degrees of confidence over the course of his brief but brilliant career, with several key visions of what death might be or actually is. Shelley's Visions of Death stresses the seldom-appreciated fact that death was one of Shelley's most enduring preoccupations, and also demonstrates the poet's power to imagine, with startling variety, that which lies beyond the boundaries of experience.

This book bridges media, technocultural, urban, and journalism studies to examine the role of journalism in relation to a smart city project on Toronto's waterfront. From the announcement of the public-private partnership called Sidewalk Toronto to the project's termination, a mediatized controversy unfolded. Through an assemblage approach to this project and a case study of The Globe and Mail and the Toronto Star, it follows the actors and chronicles the Quayside project story as a conversation about the promise and perils of a future “smart” neighbourhood. In the news of Waterfront Toronto, Sidewalk Labs, other actors, events, and developments, there were multiple voices and views, interpretations and arguments, that manifested conflicting interests and values. As a locally situated actor, journalism produced a porous discourse that expressed a propose-and-public pushback movement. This work of articulating mediation conditioned the project's alteration and dissolution within asymmetrical relations of power. In addition to a wave of opposition that inflected the project's enactment, a time lag between project time and governmental policymaking made the controversy over this future urban space intractable. With their residual symbolic power, quality journalism contributed to dialogical urban learning.

This book examines Aquinas's aesthetic thought and view of art within the broader context of medieval aesthetics and the history of aesthetic development, emphasizing its profound influence on later aesthetics. The book not only elaborates on Aquinas's efforts to establish coherence between faith and reason, the transcendent and empirical, as well as its significance, but also discusses the main contents and characteristics of Aquinas's aesthetic thought from the three aspects of the ontology of beauty, the theory of form, and the theory of experience. By examining Aquinas's aesthetic thought and view of art in relation to modern aesthetics and twentieth-century aesthetics, this book reveals the immense vitality of Aquinas's aesthetic thought.

This book explores the issue of (un)explainable technology. As we face technologies, mostly autonomous, machine-learned algorithms (AI) that elude a seamless explanation on how they work (“black boxes”), several issues both from an epistemological as well as ethical perspectives emerge. It is thus not surprising that there are plenty of technological attempts in illuminating the black box as well as philosophical efforts in conceptualizing and re- assessing our concepts of an explanation and understanding, as well emerging ethical questions on how to deal with this unexplainable technology. This book thus offers a succinct and comprehensive, opinionated but fair view on the emerging ethical debate on explainability of AI and its relevance for using AI for different more or less sensitive decision-making procedures. As a short book, the goal is to introduce the reader to the issues at hand while also offering normative arguments from different sides that motivate, complicate, and resolve these issues.

This book shows readers how the arts of improvisational theater and acting can help scientists and other experts speak about technical research to lay audiences.Focused on public speaking, this book translates the principles and processes used by actors and other theater professionals into a method for communicating science to the general public. The book is structured as a step-by-step examination of how to write an effective speech and then a guide to carefully analyzing that speech as an actor does in rehearsal before finally sharing it with an audience as a performance. In other words, the book helps science communicators identify what to say and how to say it. This book also includes prompts and exercises that the author has used in classes and workshops with scientists.

This book argues that the social story of vaccination has commonly been told through the lens of vaccine hesitancy and the myriad challenges that this broad issue poses for public health and the mitigation of preventable harms. Consequently, less sustained analytical attention has been given by social scientists to the rich tapestry of other social and political dimensions of vaccines and consequences of vaccination. This book begins from the premise that a broader approach to the technology and intervention of vaccination is required and that further social scientific analysis is needed of how societies produce and preserve high levels of vaccination coverage, as well as the social and political challenges or threats – beyond vaccine hesitancy – that may harm or restrict it. To achieve this, the book assembles and reframes evidence from medical sociology, science and technology studies, public health, health geography, and the medical humanities. In doing so it looks across the ‘immunisation social order'by analysing dimensions that have thus far been neglected or under-scrutinised, revealing not only the functioning of and central challenges to the immunisation social order, but also bringing into sharp focus the social and political nature of vaccines themselves.

This book critically examines the role of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) in higher education, against the backdrop of rapid developments in online learning. Reporting on a method by which one could isolate ideologically charged words from websites, the author underlines the need to pause, question and understand the underlying motives behind MOOCs, and ask fundamental questions about their data use, commercial interests, and ability to provide ‘good'education. With its step-by-step ideological analysis, the author challenges educators, policymakers, and students alike to reconsider the fabric of online courses and their associated platforms. The book will appeal to scholars of digital education and sociology, as well as scholars from the critical sciences.

This book chronicles over two decades of critical, artistic investigations by Paul Vanouse. His bio-media artwork utilizes the tools of the life sciences reflexively, to challenge tropes and cultural politics surrounding DNA, biotechnology, and life itself. DNA has been called a “Truth Machine”, “God's Blueprint”, the “Code of Codes” and the “Book of Life”. Vanouse's work explores questions at the heart of such evocative metaphor and hyperbole: how does DNA link us together, how does it differentiate us and how are the grand metaphors, which grant DNA complete centrality, misconstruing the complexity of life. Furthermore, how do technologies of genetic typing and identification fit within a broader cultural and political history of difference making, particularly the construction of race. Melding critical theory, artist's manifesto, participatory observation and histories of the sciences, this book offers insight into both an artistic practice and the bio-techno-sciences it interrogates.

This open access book considers the concept of the hinterland as a crucial tool for understanding the global and planetary present as a time defined by the lasting legacies of colonialism, increasing labor precarity under late capitalist regimes, and looming climate disasters. Traditionally seen to serve a (colonial) port or market town, the hinterland here becomes a lens to attend to the times and spaces shaped and experienced across the received categories of the urban, rural, wilderness or nature. In straddling these categories, the concept of the hinterland foregrounds the human and more-than-human lively processes and forms of care that go on even in sites defined by capitalist extraction and political abandonment. Bringing together scholars from the humanities and social sciences, the book rethinks hinterland materialities, affectivities, and ecologies across places and cultural imaginations, Global North and South, urban and rural, and land and water.

This book focuses on Ireland's lived experience of tuberculosis as represented in the nation's fiction; not surprisingly, the disease both manifests and conceals itself with devastating frequency in literature as it did in life. It seeks to place the history of tuberculosis in Ireland, from 1800 until after its virtual eradication in the mid-Twentieth Century, in conversation with fictional representations or repressions of a condition so fearsome that until very recently it was usually referred to by code words and euphemisms rather than by its name.

J.G. Ballard's Crash (1973) remains a byword for transgression in literature: declared'too disgusting for words'upon publication. The basis for David Cronenberg's equally provocative film, Crash has been regarded variously as the apotheosis of New Wave science fiction, the ur-source for postmodernism, a transhumanist manifesto, and a pornographic masterpiece in the tradition of Sade and Bataille. This revisionist account, based on previously unexplored archive material, shatters the myths that have accrued around this tantalising work whilst also revealing why it continues to inspire writers, artists, musicians and filmmakers in the 21st century. The book vividly reconstructs how Ballard came to write Crash, the cultural landscape in which it was written, the effect of its reception, and the toll it took on its author. New perspectives reveal how Crash reworks surrealist anthropology, evolutionary theory, and pornographic imagery in order to expose a society addicted to the abuse of power, the silencing of others, and its own environmental destruction. As Ballard later admitted, he'must have been mad'to write Crash.

This book starts from the very beginning of the cultural exchanges between China and the western regions, to the exchanges in modern times, featuring large time span and interdisciplinarity. In addition to elaborate illustrations including precious pictures and sketch maps, a large amount of archaeological data, as well as both Chinese and foreign literature, are employed in the book to provide the readers with a comprehensive, in-depth and systematic introduction of the cultural exchanges between China and the west regions from neolithic age to present China after Reform and Opening Up. The intended readership includes professionals, college students, graduates specializing in Chinese history, philosophy and culture, as well as those interested in oriental civilizations.

This open access book presents state-of-the-art insights on transdisciplinary work towards societal transformation. It provides theoretical and practical guidance and tools, applicable across diverse empirical settings. The book supports researchers and practitioners, especially those early in their careers, to navigate dilemmas inherent in transdisciplinarity for transformation. The book serves as a valuable resource for (graduate) educational programs in any field open to transformation-oriented transdisciplinary collaboration. It comprises three sections: Design & Evaluation; Diversity & Inclusion; Roles & Competences. Each section includes a chapter on theoretical advancements, multiple empirical chapters presenting insights from various fields and contexts, and practical guidance conducive to engaging in high-quality, just and equitable transdisciplinary processes directed at sustainable transformation.

Phenomenological approaches to sounds, noises, voices, and music traditionally privilege methods that center visual perception. This book aims not only to phenomenologically describe sonic environments, but also to develop an audition-centered phenomenological methodology to enable this task.'Sonic environment'is this book's term for the acoustic shape of human life-environment, which is multisensory and does not exclude visual, tactile, olfactory, and gustatory sensations connected with sounds or their sources. Sonic environments (in so far as they are lived) are not composed of separate sounds, but created by “sonic phenomena” – i.e., lived (real or imagined) experiences with sounds, noises, voices, and music. Just as phenomenology traditionally privileges the visual over the audio, phenomenology thematically prefers listening to a voice or a music over less articulated sonic experiences (i.e., sounds without an obvious meaning, melody, or rhythm).In this respect, the book not only provides missing phenomenological descriptions of sonic environments, but also redefines phenomenological methodology with respect to acoustic perception.

This book is a study of workers in India's Informational Technology sector, and focuses on how the past three decades of neoliberal economic reforms have impacted the efforts to organize the workers in the sector given the socio-political and economic setbacks encountered by the broader labour movement. In doing so, the book explores the role of privatization, changing gender relations inside and outside the workplace, new organizational forms created by IT workers to advance their interests, and the increasingly precarious nature of IT work. By exploring how the growth of the IT sector in India has amplified and reproduced discrimination against unskilled and marginalized elements of the labour force, the book shows the ways in which other social and political divisions create considerable barriers when it comes to the ability of IT workers to successfully collaborate with other sectors within the Indian labour movement The book will be of interest to students and researchers of sociology, labour studies, political economy and gender studies.

This book reframes the Lacanian object a voice as a horrific register of alterity. The object gaze has received, as it does in Jacques Lacan's work, more commentary than voice. Yet recently voice has garnered interest from multiple disciplines. The book intervenes in the Slovenian school's commentary of the ‘object voice'in terms of two questions: audition and corporeality. This intervention synthesizes psychoanalysis with recent theorizing of the horror of philosophy. In this intervention the object a voice is argued to resonate in lacunae – epistemological voids that evoke horror in the subject. Biological and evolutionary perspectives on voice, genre horror film and literature, music videos, close readings of Freudian and Lacanian case studies and textual analysis of ancient philosophy texts all contribute to an elucidation of the horrors of the object a voice: Vox-Exo.

This book provides a comprehensive analysis of the empirical and theoretical problems posed by the encounter between law and biology in the twenty-first century. How does biotechnology and new bioscientific knowledge affect our legal institutions, our sense of justice, and our ways of relating to one another? To answer these questions, authors Marc de Leeuw and Sonja van Wichelen examine the complex and often contested ways in which biotechnology and biological knowledge are reworked by, with, and against legal knowledge. As this book shows, recent developments in the life sciences—including molecular biology, immunology, and the neurosciences—and their applications in forensics, medicine, and agriculture test longstanding legal forms, such as property, personhood, parenthood, and (collective) identity, ultimately constituting the current field of “biolegality.” The authors argue that these biolegal contestations represent philosophical and anthropological challenges to existing understandings of exchange, self, kinship, and community. By addressing how biology and law inform new ways of relating and knowing, the book proposes a programmatic intervention, asserting the pivotal role the study of biolegality plays in advancing social and political theory.