You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
What can we learn about the nature of technology by studying practices of maintenance and repair? This volume addresses this question by bringing together scholarship from philosophers of technology working at the forefront of this emerging and exciting topic. The chapters in this volume explore how attending to maintenance and repair can challenge and complement existing ways of thinking about technology focused on use and design and introduce new philosophical perspectives on the relationship between technology, time and human practice. They examine the significance of maintenance and repair practices at different scales in relation to a diverse range of philosophical traditions and a wide...
An exploration of how email is experienced, understood, and materially structured as a practice spanning our everyday domestic and work lives. Despite its many obituaries, email is not dead. As a global mode of business and personal communication, email outstrips newer technologies of online interaction; it is deeply embedded in our everyday lives. And yet--perhaps because the ubiquity of email has obscured its study--this is the first scholarly book devoted to email as a key historical, social, and commercial site of digital communication in our everyday lives. In Email and the Everyday, Esther Milne examines how email is experienced, understood, and materially structured as a practice spanning the domestic and institutional spaces of daily life.
What does a coffee machine, a car, road signs, a smartphone, a cathedral, a work of art, a satellite, a bicycle, a washing machine, a bridge, a watch, a computer, the body of a prominent politician and a tractor have in common? Pretty much nothing – except for the fact that, no matter how small, large, important or insignificant something is, it rarely survives without being cared for. Every object eventually experiences wear and tear, it deteriorates, stops working or breaks down. But are we giving the care of things the recognition it deserves? A counterpoint to our modern obsession with innovation but less striking than the one-off act of restoration, the delicate act of making things l...
A collection of timely new scholarship, Repair: Sustainable Design Futures investigates repair as a contemporary expression of empowerment, agency, and resistance to our unmaking of the world and the environment. Repair is an act, metaphor, and foundation for opening up a dialogue about design’s role in proposing radically different social, environmental, and economic futures. Thematically expansive and richly illustrated, with over 125 visuals, this volume features an international, interdisciplinary group of contributors from across the design spectrum whose voices and artwork speak to how we might address our broken social and physical worlds. Organized around reparative thinking and practices, the book includes 30 long and short chapters, photo essays, and interviews that focus on multiple responses to fractured systems, relationships, cities, architecture, objects, and more. Repair will encourage students, academics, researchers, and practitioners in art, design and architecture practice and theory, cultural studies, environment and sustainability, to discuss, engage, and rethink the act of repair and its impact on our society and environment.
Much valued by design professionals, controversially discussed in the media, regularly misunderstood by the public and systematically regulated by public procurement; in recent years, architecture competitions have become projection screens for various and often incommensurable desires and hopes. Almost all texts on architectural competition engage it for particular reasons, whether these be for celebration of the procedure, or dismissal. Moving on from such polarised views, Architecture Competition is a revelatory study on what really happens when competitions take place. But the story is not just about architecture and design; it is about the whole construction process, from the definition...
This collection of essays sheds light on repair as a disposition to material culture and a practice rooted in diverse sociocultural experiences. It provides an in-depth exploration of how repair manifests itself through the different lenses of governance, grassroots activism, transformative design and community-led initiatives. Most importantly, the chapters demonstrate how place-based approaches can reveal blueprints for social impact in circumstances of growing environmental and social precariousness.
An investigation of the causes and consequences of the strange, ambivalent, and increasingly central role of infrastructure repair in modern life. Infrastructures—communication, food, transportation, energy, and information—are all around us, and their enduring function and influence depend on the constant work of repair. In this book, Christopher Henke and Benjamin Sims explore the causes and consequences of the strange, ambivalent, and increasingly central role of infrastructure repair in modern life. Henke and Sims offer examples, from local to global, to investigate not only the role of repair in maintaining infrastructures themselves but also the social and political orders that are...
How ten making & doing projects expand STS scholarship through a focus on knowledge expression and knowledge travel in addition to knowledge production. Making & doing projects expand STS scholarship to include the trajectories of STS knowledge flow beyond the boundaries of the field by actively interweaving knowledge expression and travel with knowledge production. In this edited volume, contributors from around the world present and critically assess ten empirical making & doing projects. They recount how their projects advance STS, and describe how they themselves learn from their interlocutors and the settings in which they do and share their STS work. A coda explains how the infrastruct...
Traveling with Sugar reframes the rising diabetes epidemic as part of a five-hundred-year-old global history of sweetness and power. Amid eerie injuries, changing bodies, amputated limbs, and untimely deaths, many people across the Caribbean and Central America simply call the affliction “sugar”—or, as some say in Belize, “traveling with sugar.” A decade in the making, this book unfolds as a series of crónicas—a word meaning both slow-moving story and slow-moving disease. It profiles the careful work of those “still fighting it” as they grapple with unequal material infrastructures and unsettling dilemmas. Facing a new incarnation of blood sugar, these individuals speak back to science and policy misrecognitions that have prematurely cast their lost limbs and deaths as normal. Their families’ arts of maintenance and repair illuminate ongoing struggles to survive and remake larger systems of food, land, technology, and medicine.
Situated within the field of discourse-oriented approaches to policy and media, this collection explores the interface between government, media and the public, highlighting the increasing importance placed on media channelled 'public opinion' as part of a democratic process. The authors use a variety of discourse analytic methods including CA/MCA, Discourse Analysis and Interactionism, to provide discussions around the social organization of policy debate in media sites including news interviews, public access broadcasts, broadcast debates, panel discussions, mediated government initiatives, newspapers and news broadcasts. The book's geographical coverage spans the USA, Canada, the UK, Europe, Asia and Australia. This volume offers a major contribution to discourse analysis and its emphasis on policy substance will appeal to a broad audience in social and public policy, political communication, journalism and politics.