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This open access book offers unique insight into how and where ideas and instruments of quantification have been adopted, and how they have come to matter. Rather than asking what quantification is, New Politics of Numbers explores what quantification does, its manifold consequences in multiple domains. It scrutinizes the power of numbers in terms of the changing relations between numbers and democracy, the politics of evidence, and dreams and schemes of bettering society. The book engages Foucault inspired studies of quantification and the economics of convention in a critical dialogue. In so doing, it provides a rich account of the plurality of possible ways in which numbers have come to govern, highlighting not only their disciplinary effects, but also the collective mobilization capacities quantification can offer. This book will be invaluable reading for academics and graduate students in a wide variety of disciplines, as well as policymakers interested in the opportunities and pitfalls of governance by numbers.
Classing -- Fatalizing -- Writing -- Smoothing -- A modern conception of death -- Valuing lives, in four movements -- Failing the future.
An international array of human rights advocates, scholars, and survivor-writers examine the profound and complex impact of personal testimony about human rights abuses as expressed through autobiography, documentary film, report, oral history, blog, and verbatim theater.
In this major work, sociologists Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello go to the heart of the changes in contemporary capitalism. Via an unprecedented analysis of the latest management texts that have formed the thinking of employers in their reorganization of business, the authors trace the contours of a new spirit of capitalism. They argue that from the middle of the 1970s onwards, capitalism abandoned the hierarchical Fordist work structure and developed a new network-based form of organization that was founded on employee initiative and autonomy in the workplace-a "freedom" that came at the cost of material and psychological security. The authors connect this new spirit with the children of th...
This open access collection of essays explores the emotional agency of images in the construction of ‘humanitarian crises’ from the nineteenth century to the present. Using the prism of the histories of emotions and the senses, the chapters examine the pivotal role images have in shaping cultural, social and political reactions to the suffering of others and to the establishment of the international networks of solidarity. Questioning certain emotions assumed to underlie humanitarianism such as sympathy, empathy and compassion, they demonstrate how the experience of such emotions has shifted over time. Understanding images as emotional objects, contributors from a wide horizon of disciplines explore how their production, circulation and reception has been crucial to the perception of humanitarian crises in a long-term historical perspective.
This collection examines the uses of quantification in climate science, higher education, and health. Numbers may seem fragile--they are, after all, frequent objects of obfuscation or outright denial--but they have also never been more influential in our society, figuring into everything from college rankings to vaccine efficacy rates. This timely collection by a diverse group of humanists and social scientists challenges undue reverence or skepticism toward quantification and shows how it can be a force for good despite its many abuses. Limits of the Numerical focuses on quantification in several contexts: the role of numerical estimates and targets in explaining and planning for climate ch...
This book is based on the understanding that the diversity and heterogeneity of science and society are not only issue of critique, but engender experimental forms of collaboration. Building on John Dewey’s experimental theory of knowledge and inquiry, practice theory, science and technology studies and the anthropology of nature, the book offers a trenchant redefinition of a present-focused sociology as a science of experience in the spirit of experimentalism. Crisis, instead of being a mere problem, is understood as the baseline for creativity and innovation. Committed to the experimental pursuit, the book provides an experience-based methodological approach for an inter- and trans disciplinary sociology. Finally, it argues for a globalized and transformative sociological outreach beyond established epistemic and national borders. This book is of interest to sociologists and other social scientists pursuing experimentalism in theory, method and/or practice.
Agricultural Economists in Early Twentieth-Century Italy describes how Italian agricultural economists collected information about the economy of Italy, between the Giolittian and the Fascist era. The book carefully describes three main forms of economic observation: enquiries, statistics, and farm surveys. For each of these forms of observation, the main participants to the investigation are discussed with their respective agendas, alongside the purposes of the investigation, and its practical constraints. This work introduces the concept of "stakeholder statistics", and stresses the two-way relation between the observer and the observed in the co-production of observational knowledge. Prac...
Profound analysis of French comics through a postcolonial lens Postcolonialism and migration are major themes in contemporary French comics and have roots in the Algerian War (1954–62), antiracist struggle, and mass migration to France. This volume studies comics from the end of the formal dismantling of French colonial empire in 1962 up to the present. French cartoonists of ethnic-minority and immigrant heritage are a major focus, including Zeina Abirached (Lebanon), Yvan Alagbé (Benin), Baru (Italy), Enki Bilal (former Yugoslavia), Farid Boudjellal (Algeria and Armenia), José Jover (Spain), Larbi Mechkour (Algeria), and Roland Monpierre (Guadeloupe). The author analyzes comics representing a gamut of perspectives on immigration and postcolonial ethnic minorities, ranging from staunch defense to violent rejection. Individual chapters are dedicated to specific artists, artistic collectives, comics, or themes, including avant-gardism, undocumented migrants in comics, and racism in far-right comics.
Driven by the increasing importance of discussions around 'impact' and its meaning and implications for history, The Impact of History? brings together established and new voices to raise relevant questions, issues and controversies for debate. The chapters are articulated around the themes of public history, the politics of history, the role of history in the shaping of learning and the situation of history in the changing world of education. While this subject is driven differently by the research bodies and councils of different countries, similar debates about the value and place of the academy in society are taking place in the UK, the USA and Europe as well as in other parts of the wor...