You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
The Atlas of Petromodernity is many things in one: historical and geographical non-fiction, cultural theory essay, and picture book. In forty-four short essays, inspired by an equal amount of pictorial findings, Klose and Steininger develop a technical, geographical, political, and speculative panorama of the declining era of petroleum modernity. The authors stroll through Baku, Rotterdam, and Louisiana, into Manchuria and through the Vienna Basin. They read Bertolt Brecht, technical manuals, and petroculture theory, and they listen to Neil Young. They go to the moon, through refineries and over highways emptied by the COVID-19 pandemic. They confront petrochemistry with petromelancholy, catalysis with catharsis, cosmos with cosmetics. The Atlas of Petromodernity tackles the contradictory ambivalences of a substance that has been vital for our epoch, and whose roles and meanings need to be understood in order to be able to leave this epoch behind.
Die Erdöl-Moderne ist ein lokales Phänomen der Geschichte Kuwaits, aber auch ein globales Ereignis und massgebliche Ursache des Klimawandels. Die Studie untersucht die Rolle von Erdöl in der visuellen Kultur Kuwaits im Kontext von Ideologien wie Modernisierung und politischer Repräsentation. Der Begriff des Irisierenden, eines in Regenbogenfarben schillernden Farbenspiels, dient als analytisch-ästhetisches Konzept, um den umstrittenen Beitrag von Erdöl in der Moderne zu diskutieren: sowohl Wohlstandsversprechen wie auch destruktive Kraft in soziokultureller und ökologischer Hinsicht. Das Buch versammelt eine Fülle historischen Bildmaterials, darunter Luft- und Farbfotografien, Briefmarken, Stadtpläne und Architekturdarstellungen, um unter Berücksichtigung von zeitgenössischer Kunst aus der Golfregion das visuelle Erbe der Erdöl- Moderne kritisch zu hinterfragen.
A fundamentally new approach to the history of science and technology This book presents a new way of thinking about the history of science and technology, one that offers a grand narrative of human history in which knowledge serves as a critical factor of cultural evolution. Jürgen Renn examines the role of knowledge in global transformations going back to the dawn of civilization while providing vital perspectives on the complex challenges confronting us today in the Anthropocene—this new geological epoch shaped by humankind. Renn reframes the history of science and technology within a much broader history of knowledge, analyzing key episodes such as the evolution of writing, the emerge...
A comprehensive history and examination of global infrastructures and the outsized role they play in our lives. Infrastructure is essential to defining how the public functions, yet there is little public knowledge regarding why and how it became today’s strongest global force over government and individual lives. Who should build and maintain infrastructures? How are they to be protected? And why are they all in such bad shape? In Lifelines of Our Society, Dirk van Laak offers broad audiences a history of global infrastructures—focused on Western societies, over the past two hundred years—that considers all their many paradoxes. He illustrates three aspects of infrastructure: their de...
Offering a sweeping transatlantic perspective, this book explains the current obsession with automobiles by delving deep into the motives of early car users. It provides a synthesis of our knowledge about the emergence and persistence of the car, using a broad range of material including novels, poems, films, and songs ...
Museums and Entrepreneurship: The Effects of Capitalising on Culture in the 21st Century addresses the largely under-examined impact that different entrepreneurial endeavours have on museum practices today. It identifies an entrepreneurial turn in today’s neoliberal context and critically evaluates how this turn redefines museums in organisational, conceptual and empirical terms. It assesses the challenges that different types of museums face, examining how they are conceptualised, managed and experienced in order to remain financially viable while also remaining relevant to the communities they should serve. It brings to the fore the dynamic relationships formed across corporate sponsors,...
Anthroposcreens frames the 'climate unconscious' as a reading strategy for film and television productions during the Anthropocene. Drawing attention to the affects of climate change and the broader environmental damage of the Anthropocene, this study mobilizes its frame in concert with other tools from cultural and film studies—such as debates over Black representation—to provide readings of the underlying environmental themes in Black American and Norwegian screen texts. These bodies of work provide a useful counterpoint to the dominance of white Anglo-American stories in cli-fi while also ranging beyond the boundaries of the cli-fi genre to show how the climate unconscious lens functions in a broader set of texts. Working across film studies, cultural studies, Black studies, and the environmental humanities, Anthroposcreens establishes a cross-disciplinary reading strategy of the 'climate unconscious' for contemporary film and television productions. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
Boom – Crisis – Heritage, these terms aptly outline the history of global coal mining after 1945. The essays collected in this volume explore this history with different emphases and questions. The range of topics also reflects this broad approach. The first section contains contributions on political, social and economic history. They address the European energy system in the globalised world of the 20th and 21st centuries as well as specific social policies in mining regions. The second section then focuses on the medialisation of mining and its legacies, also paying attention to the environmental history of mining. The anthology, which goes back to a conference of the same name at the Deutsches Bergbau-Museum Bochum, thus offers a multi-faceted insight into the research field of modern mining history.
In recent years, the far right has done everything in its power to accelerate the heating: an American president who believes it is a hoax has removed limits on fossil fuel production. The Brazilian president has opened the Amazon and watched it burn. In Europe, parties denying the crisis and insisting on maximum combustion have stormed into office, from Sweden to Spain. On the brink of breakdown, the forces most aggressively promoting business-as-usual have surged - always in defense of white privilege, against supposed threats from non-white others. Where have they come from? The first study of the far right in the climate crisis, White Skin, Black Fuel: On the Danger of Fossil Fascism presents an eye-opening sweep of a novel political constellation, and reveals its deep historical roots. Fossil-fueled technologies were born steeped in racism. None loved them more passionately than the classical fascists. As such forces rise to the surface, some profess to have the solution - closing borders to save the climate. Epic and riveting, White Skin, Black Fuel traces a future of political fronts that can only heat up.
Ruthenberg highlights the unique aspects of chemistry, specifically its metachemical fundamentals, which have been largely overlooked in current philosophies of science. Conventional metaphysics, derived from or focused on theoretical physics, is inadequate when applied to chemistry. The author examines and integrates historical and philosophical perspectives on important aspects of chemistry, including affinity, compositionism, emergence, synthesis/analysis, atomism/non-atomism, chemical species, chemical bond, chemical concepts, plurality, temporality/potentiality, reactivity, and underdetermination. To accomplish this, he draws on the works of notable chemists such as František Wald, Wilhelm Ostwald, Friedrich Paneth, and Hans Primas, who have contributed to the philosophical understanding of chemistry. The central conclusion of this study aligns with Immanuel Kant's viewpoint: Chemistry is a systematic art.