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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...
Discussions on globalization now routinely focus on the economic impact of developing countries in Asia, Africa, the Middle East, the former Soviet Union and Latin America. Only twenty-five years ago, many developing countries were largely closed societies. Today, the growing power of “emerging markets” is reordering the geopolitical landscape. On a purchasing power parity basis, emerging economies now constitute half of the world’s economic activity. Financial markets too are seeing growing integration: Asia now accounts for 1/3 of world stock markets, more than double that of just 15 years ago. Given current trajectories, most economists predict that China and India alone will accoun...
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.
Around the world, what it is to be a university is a matter of much debate. The range of ideas of the university in public circulation is, however, exceedingly narrow and is dominated by the idea of the entrepreneurial university. As a consequence, the debate is hopelessly impoverished. Lurking in the literature, there is a broad and even imaginative array of ideas of the university, but those ideas are seldom heard. We need, consequently, not just more ideas of the university but better ideas. Imagining the University forensically examines this situation, critically interrogating many of the current ideas of the university. Imagining the University argues for imaginative ideas that are critical, sensitive to the deep structures underlying universities and are yet optimistic, in short feasible utopias of the university. The case is pressed for one such idea, that of the ecological university. The book concludes by offering a vision of the imagining university, a university that has the capacity continually to re-imagine itself.
Education is always evolving, consistently with a society in flux. So transformations in learning and pedagogy are necessary. These endless, rapid changes in pedagogy influence students and educators in a variety of ways and awake diverse emotions, from happiness to fear, from joy to anger. Emotions are proven to influence the ways students interact with the world. In the present book, the authors reflect on emotions and education from multiple perspectives: the socio-cultural perspective that looks at interactions among individuals, the creation and recreation of the self and others, the study of collaboration, change processes (transformative learning) and aesthetic and creative learning p...