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'The traditional analysis of infrastructure networks has provided the conceptual rationalization for centralized monopolies for a century. In recent years, liberalization has shown that much wider participation can be beneficial. Innovative development in decentralized networks can be driven from below if government policies permit it, as vividly demonstrated by the Internet. This book contributes to a much needed exploration into the characteristics and implications of decentralized networks being driven from below, introducing new perspectives on the conception and analysis of infrastructure networks.' William H. Melody, Aalborg University, Denmark and Delft University of Technology, The N...
This book offers an in-depth investigation into the digitisation processes of Europe’s border regime. It shows how sociotechnical imaginations of future borders drive forward the expansion of databases in the European governance of mobility. With a focus on the European Union Agency eu-LISA, one of the most significant and rapidly advancing actors in the digital border regime, the book serves as a gateway to understanding the key agents, visions, technologies and practices at work. Asking broader questions about exclusion, discrimination, violence and mobility rights, this is an original contribution to our understanding of future borders in Europe.
The relationship between infrastructure governance and the ways we read and represent waste systems, examined through three waste tracking and participatory sensing projects. Waste is material information. Landfills are detailed records of everyday consumption and behavior; much of what we know about the distant past we know from discarded objects unearthed by archaeologists and interpreted by historians. And yet the systems and infrastructures that process our waste often remain opaque. In this book, Dietmar Offenhuber examines waste from the perspective of information, considering emerging practices and technologies for making waste systems legible and how the resulting datasets and visual...
The potential uses of CRISPR-Cas9 and other gene editing technologies are unprecedented in human history. Altering human DNA, however, raises enormously difficult questions. Some of these questions are about safety: Can these technologies be deployed without posing an unreasonable risk of physical harm to current and future generations? But gene editing technologies also raise other moral questions, which touch on deeply held, personal, cultural, and societal values. In the new essays collected here, an interdisciplinary group of scholars asks age-old questions about the nature and well-being of humans in the context of a revolutionary new biotechnology--one that has the potential to change the genetic make-up of both existing people and future generations.
"The Cold War was not simply a duel of superpowers. It took place not just in Washington and Moscow, but also in the social and political arenas of geographically far-flung countries emerging from colonial rule. Moreover, Cold War tensions were manifest not only in global political disputes, but also in struggles over technology. Technological systems and expertise offered a powerful way to shape countries politically, economically, socially, and culturally. [This book] explores how Cold War politics, imperialism, and postcolonial nation building became entangled in technologies and considers the legacies of those entanglements for today's globalized world. The essays address such topics as the islands and atolls taken over for military and technological purposes by the supposedly non-imperial United States, apartheid-era South Africa's efforts to achieve international legitimacy as a nuclear nation, international technical assistance and Cold War politics, the Saudi irrigation system that spurred a Shi'i rebellion, and the momentary technopolitics of emergency as practiced by Medecins sans Fronti?res"--Publisher description.
This book reconsiders the power of the idea of the future. Bringing together perspectives from cultural history, environmental history, political history and the history of science, it investigates how the future became a specific field of action in liberal democratic, state socialist and post-colonial regimes after the Second World War. It highlights the emergence of new forms of predictive scientific expertise in this period, and shows how such forms of expertise interacted with political systems of the Cold War world order, as the future became the prism for dealing with post-industrialisation, technoscientific progress, changing social values, Cold War tensions and an emerging Third Worl...
"Over the course of the past century, there has been a sustained reflective engagement about environmental risks, disasters, and human vulnerability in the technocene (a term used by some humanist scholars to characterize the era in which we live, characterized by complex technologies with accompanying hazards that can potentially harm human societies and their living environments on historically unprecedented scales). This inquiry has raised a host of crucial questions. Just how safe in humanity is in a world of toxic chemicals and industrial installations that have destructive potential? What are the discordant consequences of the transformations of the natural world by twentieth century technologies? To what extent is it feasible to contain chemical, nuclear, and other pollutants? Is it at all possible to prevent runaway disasters in highly complex industrial technoscapes? In what way do environmental hazards impact social and political orders? The purpose of this essay is to help scholars and indeed ordinary citizens not versed in the extent literature in scientific, public policy and humanistic genres, understand their social theoretic import"--
In the Museum of Man offers new insight into the thorny relationship between science, society, and empire at the high-water mark of French imperialism and European racism. Alice L. Conklin takes us into the formative years of French anthropology and social theory between 1850 and 1900; then deep into the practice of anthropology, under the name of ethnology, both in Paris and in the empire before and especially after World War I; and finally, into the fate of the discipline and its practitioners under the German Occupation and its immediate aftermath. Conklin addresses the influence exerted by academic networks, museum collections, and imperial connections in defining human diversity sociocu...
A New History of Anthropology collects original writings from pre-eminent scholars to create a sophisticated but accessible guide to the development of the field. Re-examines the history of anthropology through the lens of the new globalized world Provides a comprehensive history of the discipline, from its prehistory in the ‘age of exploration’ through to anthropology’s current condition and its relationship with other disciplines Places ideas and practices within the context of their time and place of origin Looks at anthropology’s role in colonization, early traditions in the field, and topical issues from various periods in the field’s history, and examines its relationship to other disciplines
In this comprehensive history of symbiosis theory--the first to be written--Jan Sapp masterfully traces its development from modest beginnings in the late nineteenth century to its current status as one of the key conceptual frameworks for the life sciences. The symbiotic perspective on evolution, which argues that "higher species" have evolved from a merger of two or more different kinds of organisms living together, is now clearly established with definitive molecular evidence demonstrating that mitochondria and chloroplasts have evolved from symbiotic bacteria. In telling the exciting story of an evolutionary biology tradition that has effectively challenged many key tenets of classical neo-Darwinism, Sapp sheds light on the phenomena, movements, doctrines, and controversies that have shaped attitudes about the scope and significance of symbiosis. Engaging and insightful, Evolution by Association will be avidly read by students and researchers across the life sciences.