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The concept of the 'smart city' as the confluence of urban planning and technological innovation has become a predominant feature of public policy discourse. Despite its expanding influence, however, there is little consensus on the precise meaning of a 'smart city'. One reason for this ambiguity is that the term means different things to different disciplines. For some, the concept of the 'smart city' refers to advances in sustainability and green technologies. For others, it refers to the deployment of information and communication technologies as next generation infrastructure. This volume focuses on a third strand in this discourse, specifically technology driven changes in democracy and...
Charts the emergence and development of capitalism across the world from a variety of perspectives, providing a deep understanding of how capitalism came to be the dominant economic force. This book re-examines the historical emergence and evolution of capitalism. Why did a radically new way of organizing economic life emerge in regions of the early modern world? Why did it eventually encompass the globe, tying the peoples of the world together in a common economic fate? These questions have been at the heart of historical and social-scientific inquiry since the nineteenth century. They are explored and answered anew by the scholars gathered together in this geographically and theoretically ...
This book studies the rise of access over ownership and the sharing economy's challenges to the liberal vision of property.
American Higher Education in a Global Context: Historical Perspectives describes the current state of universities on each continent, providing a comprehensive analysis of the numerous factors that have affected higher education systems around the world. This book studies higher education from its emergence in antiquity to the establishment of the American research university model and its adoption around the globe, through the current Covid-19 pandemic and concomitant economic and political crisis. The author pays special attention to the shortcomings of the neoliberal trend of the last four decades, which increased social stratification at institutions of higher learning. Calling for an expansion of access to tertiary education, and in particular, to research universities, this book examines the competition between China and the United States in the field of higher education, stressing the importance of academic freedom, without which there can be no true academic excellence.
How is labour changing in the age of computers, the Internet, and "social media" such as Facebook, Google, YouTube and Twitter? In Digital Labour and Karl Marx, Christian Fuchs attempts to answer that question, crafting a systematic critical theorisation of labour as performed in the capitalist ICT industry. Relying on a range of global case studies--from unpaid social media prosumers or Chinese hardware assemblers at Foxconn to miners in the Democratic Republic of Congo--Fuchs sheds light on the labour costs of digital media, examining the way ICT corporations exploit human labour and the impact of this exploitation on the lives, bodies, and minds of workers.
Understanding social media requires us to engage with the individual and collective meanings that diverse stakeholders and participants give to platforms. It also requires us to analyse how social media companies try to make profits, how and which labour creates this profit, who creates social media ideologies, and the conditions under which such ideologies emerge. In short, understanding social media means coming to grips with the relationship between culture and the economy. In this thorough study, Christian Fuchs, one of the leading analysts of the Internet and social media, delves deeply into the subject by applying the approach of cultural materialism to social media, offering readers t...
Does IT poison the minds of the young? Must educational institutions change to serve the needs of the twenty-first century? This book addresses these questions and more. It records the intellectual struggles of a group of scholars coming to grips with changes in knowledge production and research communication. Together these authors demonstrate how philosophical and historical approaches are relevant to the practice and theory of education.
'The Anthem Companion to Georg Simmel' brings together new interpretations of the work of this sociologist and philosopher. The companion highlights issues, themes and concepts that most concern readers in social and cultural theory today, with an emphasis on critical perspectives that show how Simmel's work is relevant, interesting and significant for contemporary discussions and debates. Also included in this volume is Austin Harrington’s translation of selections from Simmel’s book on Goethe and a comprehensive list of Simmel’s work in English.
After the end of Euro-American hegemony and the return of the multi-centric world, Eurocentrism in philosophy and the social sciences has come under attack. However, no real alternative has been proposed. This provides an opportunity to reassess the philosophy of the social sciences that has been developed in the West. This book argues that the re-emergence of a multi-centric world allows the Euro-centric social sciences in general, and critical theory in particular, to finally disengage from countless paradoxes and impasses by which they have heretofore been hindered. The author presents a solution in the form of the "kaleidoscopic dialectic." This dialectic is unique in that it is able to ...
The essays in this edited collection reflect on the nature of open education resources, where the question on openness for education emerges. What is remarkable today are the ways that teachers and institutions now begin to form part of the processes of global exchange and production of a network of global educational commons. The question about the significance of this development, their limits and the consequences for practitioners and institutions from the perspective of teachers is extremely complex. For example, the policy agenda of institutions, states, and international organizations related to the regulation of new technologies facilitates the existence and viability of those resourc...