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It has been claimed that the natural sciences have abstracted for themselves a 'material world' set apart from human concerns, and social sciences, in their turn, constructed 'a world of actors devoid of things'. While a subject such as archaeology, by its very nature, takes objects into account, other disciplines, such as psychology, emphasize internal mental structures and other non-material issues. This book brings together a team of contributors from across the social sciences who have been taking 'things' more seriously to examine how people relate to objects. The contributors focus on every day objects and how these objects enter into our activities over the course of time. Using a combination of different theoretical approaches, including actor network theory, ecological psychology, cognitive linguistics and science and technology studies, the book argues against the standard notion of objects and their properties as inert and meaningless and argues for the need to understand the relations between people and objects in terms of process and change.
Demonstrating that there are (superior) alternatives to the modern macroeconomic mainstream and its DSGE (dynamic stochastic general equilibrium) models, this book presents the cutting edge in macroeconomic modelling, economic policy, and methodology from the perspective of heterodox economic thinking. The first part of the book explores methodological issues, advocating for a stronger ethical consideration in macroeconomics and for the adoption of a strategy of pluralism to ensure that macroeconomic theory is capable of adapting to real-world issues. The second part highlights recent trends in empirical Stock-Flow Consistent models by collecting a group of the most well-developed empirical ...
How should Europe cope with the negative and still unfolding economic consequences of the current economic crisis? And why does Europe seem to be more conservative than the USA in dealing with the crisis? Since the outbreak of the current international economic crisis in 2008, the USA and many of the European countries have been tormented by high levels of unemployment and low levels of inflation, interest rates close to zero and fiscal policies of austerity. As such, the modern economic mainstream has been challenged by these empirical facts. Today, several years after the outbreak of the international economic crisis, supply side effects do not seem to be increasing employment as the moder...
"... an original, quirky, and illuminating collection of material concerning the relatively new and exciting field of technoscience studies.... T]he editors' choice of multiple approaches to the work of four major figures is wholly suited to clarifying their unorthodox and consequently somewhat elusive philosophical positions." --Robert Scharff Although often absent from the considerations of philosophers, sociologists, and anthropologists, the material dimension plays an important and even essential role in the practices of the sciences. Chasing Technoscience: Matrix for Materiality begins to redress this absence by bringing together four prominent figures who make technoscience, or science embodied in its technologies, a central theme of their work. Through lively personal interviews and substantive essays, the ideas of Andrew Pickering, Don Ihde, Donna Haraway, and Bruno Latour are brought to bear on the question of materiality in technoscience. The work of these theorists is then compared and critiqued in essays by colleagues. Chasing Technoscience is a ground-breaking, state-of-the-art look at current developments in technoscience.
This book is devoted to the progression of Post-Keynesian economics, taking stock of the previous 10 years of persistent imbalances in many dimensions of macroeconomic ‘reality’. This has given inspiration to Post-Keynesian scholars to make innovative contributions in areas like methodology, macroeconomic modelling and teaching. One challenge discussed in several chapters is how to model a complex macro-system where microeconomic uncertainty is increasing? This aspect is elaborated in a number of contributions which focus on the role of the financial sector and financialization for macroeconomic disruptions. Additional chapters deal with teaching and the use of case-studies for a better understanding of the real world economy.
Rather than focusing on political, economic, or social manifestations of technology and globalization, this book examines these related phenomena from a philosophical perspective. Prominent thinkers from philosophy, sociology, and political science reflect on a variety of important topics and individuals, including the Internet, citizenship, individuality, the human condition, spirituality, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Kojève, and Strauss. The contributors ask whether political community and citizenship are still possible in an age of technology and globalization, and what it means to be human in a globalized technological society.
What makes a city? What makes architecture? And, what is to be included in the discussions of architecture and the city? Attempting to answer such ambitious questions, this book starts from a city’s specificity and complexity. In response to recent debates in architectural theory around the agency and locus of critical action, this book tests the potential of criticality through-practice. Rather than through conceptual and ideological categorisations, it studies how architecture and criticality work within specific circumstances. Brussels, a complex city with a turbulent architectural and urban past, forms a compelling case for examining the tensions between urban politics, architectural i...
All schools of thought in economics, explicitly or otherwise, have referred to economic disorder as a self-evident fact. They have also unanimously considered it to be a temporary state. By contrast, this book contends that economic disorder is an interminable condition of human existence. From this perspective, the present study brings to light the misunderstanding of successive generations of economists on economic disorders. This book provides an alternative exposition of economic disorder and correctional measures that can be taken in order to correct these misconceptions. The analysis offered in this book is a scholarly work that provides a thorough explanation of the hidden dimensions ...
Theoretically innovative and empirically wide-ranging, this book examines the complex relations between technoscience and everyday life. It draws on numerous examples, including both mundane technologies such as Velcro, Post-it notes, mobile phones and surveillance cameras, and the esoterica of xenotransplantation, new genetics, nanotechnology and posthuman society. Technoscience and Everyday Life traces the multiple ways in which technoscience features in and affects the dynamics of everyday life, and explores how the everyday influences the course of technoscience. In the process, it takes account of a range of core social scientific themes: body, identity, citizenship, society, space, and time. It combines critique and microsocial analysis to develop several novel conceptual tools, and addresses key contemporary theoretical debates on posthumanism, social-material divides, process philosophy and complexity, temporality and spatiality. The book is a major contribution to the sociology of everyday life, science and technology studies, and social theory.
A critical study of diabetes in the popular imagination Over twenty-nine million people in the United States, more than nine percent of the population, have some form of diabetes. In Managing Diabetes, Jeffrey A. Bennett focuses on how the disease is imagined in public culture. Bennett argues that popular anecdotes, media representation, and communal myths are as meaningful as medical and scientific understandings of the disease. In focusing on the public character of the disease, Bennett looks at health campaigns and promotions as well as the debate over public figures like Sonia Sotomayor and her management of type 1 diabetes. Bennett examines the confusing and contradictory public depicti...