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Digital Culture & Society (DCS)
Modern mundane life is brimming with a variety of data-driven technologies that are supposed to augment the practices they are involved in. As humans bring these technologies into their lives in a process of domestication, they tame them and are simultaneously influenced by their presence. In combining domestication research and an empirical analysis of current, digital, and interconnected media, this issue examines the process of taming with an emphasis on practices. The contributions in this issue explore the use of digitally connected media such as vacuum robots, smart speakers, drones, and kitchen appliances with reference to the domestication paradigm from interdisciplinary perspectives including media studies, sociology, anthropology, and human-computer interaction.
Narrating Experiences of Alzheimer's Through the Arts
While Alzheimer's might be associated with a difficulty to express oneself, Ana Paula Barbosa-Fohrmann addresses this topic by examining experiences with Alzheimer's based on narratives. In this original contribution, she studies the nexus of life stories, subjectivity, fragmentation, and fiction. The philosophical basis of this research is phenomenology from the end of the 19th century to the middle of the 20th century, specifically that of Husserl and above all that of Merleau-Ponty. This work also draws on Proust's and Camus' literature as well as Beckett's dramaturgy.
Dreaming Big in Post-War Greece
In post-war Greece, Western Allies, the country's conservative political elite and parts of the middle class share a dream of consolidating and maintaining the country's Western, bourgeois-liberal orientation. In 1947, with the civil war still raging in the country, the Greek government chooses the path of the capitalist countries and joins the American program for the reconstruction of war-torn Europe. Miltiadis Zermpoulis focuses on the impact and significance of the social and political changes brought about by the civil war, the dominance of conservatives in the political arena and the promotion of political surveillance and compliance technologies in the daily life of Greece's second largest city, Thessaloniki.
Reading Race Relationally
What does it mean to write African American literature after the end of legalized segregation? In this study of Colson Whitehead's first six novels, Marlon Lieber argues that this question has permeated the Pulitzer Prize-winning author's writing since his 1999 debut The Intuitionist. Drawing on Pierre Bourdieu's relational sociology and Marxist critical theory, Lieber shows that Whitehead's oeuvre articulates the tension between the persistent presence of racism and transformations in the United States' class structure, which reveals new modes of abjection. At the same time, Whitehead imagines forms of writing that strive to transcend the histories of domination objectified in social structures and embodied in the form of habitus.
Territorial Stigmatisation
In Tarlabasi, an Istanbul neighbourhood facing massive redevelopment and displacement, marginalised residents speak about belonging, stigma, and what their community means to them. Based on a long-term ethnographic study that includes interviews, photographs, and archival research, Constanze Letsch examines how territorial stigmatisation is weaponised by the state and how differently stigmatised groups try to fight against the vilification of their neighbourhood. The contested plans of urban renewal threaten not only their homes and workplaces but a rapidly vanishing Istanbul: socio-demographic interdependencies and networks that have developed over decades.
Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality
This book features the latest research in the area of immersive technologies, presented at the 5th International Augmented and Virtual Reality Conference, held in Munich, Germany in 2019. Bridging the gap between academia and industry, it presents the state of the art in augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) technologies and their applications in various industries such as marketing, education, healthcare, tourism, events, fashion, entertainment, retail and the gaming industry. The volume is a collection of research papers by prominent AR and VR scholars from around the globe. Covering the most significant topics in the field of augmented and virtual reality and providing the latest findings, it is of interest to academics and practitioners alike.
AI - Limits and Prospects of Artificial Intelligence
The emergence of artificial intelligence has triggered enthusiasm and promise of boundless opportunities as much as uncertainty about its limits. The contributions to this volume explore the limits of AI, describe the necessary conditions for its functionality, reveal its attendant technical and social problems, and present some existing and potential solutions. At the same time, the contributors highlight the societal and attending economic hopes and fears, utopias and dystopias that are associated with the current and future development of artificial intelligence.
Disturbed Ecologies
The imaginaries of northern landscape have not remained static in the era of ecological crisis but play a pivotal function within the geopolitics of visual representation. Such imaginaries can sanction those dominant discourses that frame environmental catastrophe as the consequence of undifferentiated human activity, but, it is argued, they also have the capacity to represent a complexity and heterogeneity frequently absent from this broad discursive field. The contributors to this volume engage with the practice, curation and utilization of photography and other lens-based media, to examine the critical role of visual culture in shaping and interrogating conceptions of environmental catastrophe.
Needful Structures
How do humans, their needs, and technology interact in society? Marcel Siegler explores the dialectical relationship between human needs and desires, the demands and requirements of the built world, and the forms of organization that hold both humans and the built world together. He argues that complex societal constellations emerge from the actions individuals perform with the technological means at hand to satisfy their needs and desires in the short and long run. Based on a novel, complementary reading of French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, the study develops a conceptual framework for analyzing the intricate machinations of sociotechnical systems from a perspective on situated human-technology interaction.
On Making Fiction
Fiction is generally understood to be a fascinating, yet somehow deficient affair, merely derivative of reality. What if we could, instead, come up with an affirmative approach that takes stories seriously in their capacity to bring forth a substance of their own? Iconic texts such as Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and its numerous adaptations stubbornly resist our attempts to classify them as mere representations of reality. Friederike Danebrock shows how these texts insist that we take them seriously as agents and interlocutors in our world- and culture-making activities. Drawing on this analysis, she develops a theory of narrative fiction as a generative practice.
