You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
An examination of the relationship between technical objects and culture in contemporary China, drawing on concepts from science and technology studies. Technical objects constrain what users do with them. They are not neutral entities but embody information, choices, values, assumptions, or even mistakes embedded by designers. What happens when a technology is designed in one culture and used in another? What happens, for example, when a Chinese user is confronted by Roman-alphabet-embedded interfaces? In this book, Basile Zimmermann examines the relationship between technical objects and culture in contemporary China, drawing on concepts from science and technology studies (STS). He presen...
A Companion to New Media Dynamics presents a state-of-the-art collection of multidisciplinary readings that examine the origins, evolution, and cultural underpinnings of the media of the digital age in terms of dynamic change Presents a state-of-the-art collection of original readings relating to new media in terms of dynamic change Features interdisciplinary contributions encompassing the sciences, social sciences, humanities and creative arts Addresses a wide range of issues from the ownership and regulation of new media to their form and cultural uses Provides readers with a glimpse of new media dynamics at three levels of scale: the 'macro' or system level; the 'meso' or institutional level; and 'micro' or agency level
How the US Environmental Protection Agency designed the governance of risk and forged its legitimacy over the course of four decades. The US Environmental Protection Agency was established in 1970 to protect the public health and environment, administering and enforcing a range of statutes and programs. Over four decades, the EPA has been a risk bureaucracy, formalizing many of the methods of the scientific governance of risk, from quantitative risk assessment to risk ranking. Demortain traces the creation of these methods for the governance of risk, the controversies to which they responded, and the controversies that they aroused in turn. He discusses the professional networks in which the...
This book gathers together a number of leading design historians whose research points the way forward, aiming to address and promote changes to design history.
This volume seeks to offer a new approach to the study of music through the lens of recent works in Science and Technology Studies (STS). Applied to the study of music, this approach enables us to reconcile the human, social, factual, and technological aspects of the musical world, and opens the prospect of new areas of inquiry in musicology and sound studies. Drawing together contributions from a wide range of scholars, the book’s four sections focus on key areas of music study that are impacted by STS: organology, sound studies, music history, and epistemology.
How the breeding of new animals and plants was central to fascist regimes in Italy, Portugal, and Germany and to their imperial expansion. In the fascist regimes of Mussolini's Italy, Salazar's Portugal, and Hitler's Germany, the first mass mobilizations involved wheat engineered to take advantage of chemical fertilizers, potatoes resistant to late blight, and pigs that thrived on national produce. Food independence was an early goal of fascism; indeed, as Tiago Saraiva writes in Fascist Pigs, fascists were obsessed with projects to feed the national body from the national soil. Saraiva shows how such technoscientific organisms as specially bred wheat and pigs became important elements in th...
An innovative historical analysis of the intersection of religion and technology in making the modern state, focusing on bodily production and reproduction across the human-animal divide. In Milk and Honey, Tamar Novick writes a revolutionary environmental history of the state that centers on the intersection of technology and religion in modern Israel/Palestine. Focusing on animals and the management of their production and reproduction across three political regimes—the late-Ottoman rule, British rule, and the early Israeli state—Novick draws attention to the ways in which settlers and state experts used agricultural technology to recreate a biblical idea of past plenitude, literally a...
An examination of how technological failures defined nature and national identity in Cold War Canada. Throughout the modern period, nations defined themselves through the relationship between nature and machines. Many cast themselves as a triumph of technology over the forces of climate, geography, and environment. Some, however, crafted a powerful alternative identity: they defined themselves not through the triumph of machines over nature, but through technological failures and the distinctive natural orders that caused them. In The Unreliable Nation, Edward Jones-Imhotep examines one instance in this larger history: the Cold War–era project to extend reliable radio communications to the...
Literature is one of the richest sources of information concerning the ways in which human beings play with cognition. Human cognition is grounded in the ability to feel, perceive, and move. Kinesic Humor examines literary works written in different languages and various historical periods, in which the cognitive processing of gestures and kinesic interactions trigger humorous effects. By bringing together literary studies, cognitive studies, gesturestudies, and humor studies, this book offers an original perspective on literary artworks such as Chrétien de Troyes' Yvain, Milton's Paradise Lost, Cervantes' Don Quixote, Rousseau's Confessions, Sterne's Tristram Shandy, and Stendhal's Le Rouge et le Noir.
Most marketing scholars implicitly consider independent merchants as conservative and passive actors, and study the modernization of retailing via department stores, chains and supermarkets. In this innovative study, Franck Cochoy challenges this perspective and takes a close look at the transformation of commerce through the lens of Progressive Grocer, an American trade magazine launched in 1922. Aimed at modernizing small independent grocery stores, Progressive Grocer sowed the seeds for modern self-service which spread in small retail outlets, sometimes well before the advent of the large retail spaces which are traditionally viewed as the origin of the self-service economy. The author il...