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Abundant, salutary, problematic - energy makes history. As a symbol, resource and consumer good, it shapes technologies, politics, societies and cultural world views. Focussing on a range of energy types, from electricity and oil to bioenergy, this volume analyzes the social, cultural and political concepts and discourses of energy and their implementation and materialization within technical systems, applications, media representations and consumer practice. By examining and connecting production, mediation and consumption aspects from an international and interdisciplinary perspective, the book offers an innovative view on how energy is imagined, discussed, staged and used.
Curating the Future: Museums, Communities and Climate Change explores the way museums tackle the broad global issue of climate change. It explores the power of real objects and collections to stir hearts and minds, to engage communities affected by change. Museums work through exhibitions, events, and specific collection projects to reach different communities in different ways. The book emphasises the moral responsibilities of museums to address climate change, not just by communicating science but also by enabling people already affected by changes to find their own ways of living with global warming. There are museums of natural history, of art and of social history. The focus of this boo...
Reinventing the Museum: Relevance, Inclusion, and Global Responsibilities is the third edition following the 2004 and 2012 versions of the Reinventing series. More than a decade since the prior volume was published, this edition features all new content written since 2017 relevant to this pivotal time for museums operating in a complex world. This anthology features leading thinkers from across the globe who expertly discuss the realities facing museums, the urgency to take action, and museums as essential contributors to a more equitable and socially responsible world. The introduction highlights the issues of our times, and frames the structure of the book and intentional order of the cont...
This book offers an authoritative analysis of the challenges that have arisen as a result of modern technologies. It covers several environmental problems, such as climate change, overexploitation of natural resources, loss of natural habitats, pollution and human population growth, and discusses practical scenarios for sustainable human dwelling of our planet. Adopting an interdisciplinary approach, the first part introduces “global changes”, describing how they are happening in reality, and the challenges arising from them. The second part introduces methodological approaches borrowed from various disciplines, such as engineering, management science, philosophy and theology, which can ...
Climate change is a complex and dynamic environmental, cultural and political phenomenon that is reshaping our relationship to nature. Climate change is a global force, with global impacts. Viable solutions on what to do must involve dialogues and decision-making with many agencies, stakeholder groups and communities crossing all sectors and scales. Current policy approaches are inadequate and finding a consensus on how to reduce levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere through international protocols has proven difficult. Gaps between science and society limit government and industry capacity to engage with communities to broker innovative solutions to climate change. Drawing on leading...
Bringing together a multidisciplinary team of scholars, this book explores the importance of ethnicity and cultural economy in the post-Fordist city in the Americas. It argues that cultural, political and economic elites make use of cultural and ethnic elements in city planning and architecture in order to construct a unique image of a particular city and demonstrates how the use of ethnicized cultural production - such as urban branding based on local identities - by the economic elite raises issues of considerable concern in terms of local identities, as it deploys a practical logic of capital exchange that can overcome forms of cultural resistance and strengthen the hegemonic colonization of everyday life. At the same time, it shows how ethnic communities are able to use ethnic labelling of cultural production, ethnic economy or ethno-tourism facilities in order to change living conditions and to empower its members in ways previously impossible. Of wide ranging interest across academic disciplines, this book will be a useful contribution to Inter-American studies.
From their quirky origins to their contemporary role as centers of advocacy, a look at the secret lives of science museums—past, present, and future. Science museums have paradoxes at their core. They must be accessible and fun while representing increasingly complex science. They must be both historic and contemporary. Their exhibits attract millions, but most of their objects remain in deep storage, seldom seen. This book delves into these conflicts, revealing the secret lives of science curators; where science objects come from and who uses them; and, ultimately, what science museums are for. With an insider’s eye, Samuel J. M. M. Alberti exposes the idiosyncratic past and intriguing current practices of these institutions—and sets out a map for their future.
Religion in the Anthropocene charts a new direction in humanities scholarship through serious engagement with the geopolitical concept of the Anthropocene. Drawing on religious studies, theology, social science, history, philosophy, and what can be broadly termed as environmental humanities, this collection represents a groundbreaking critical analysis of diverse narratives on the Anthropocene. The contributors to this volume recognize that the Anthropocene began as a geological concept, the age of the humans, but that its implications are much wider than this. Does the Anthropocene idea challenge the possibility of a sacred Nature, or is it a secularized theological anthropology more properly dealt with through traditional concepts from Roman Catholic social teaching on human ecology? Not all contributors to this volume agree about the answers to these and many more different questions. Readers will be challenged, provoked, and stimulated by this book.
Presence of the Body provides an interdisciplinary forum for the dialogue between theory and practice about the impact of the body on human awareness in the fields of art, writing, meditative practice, and performance. This dialogue benefits from the neuro-systematic integration of “embodied” knowledge in the cognitive sciences, but it also suggests creative and transformative dynamics of embodiment which, beyond conceptualisation, emerge in sophisticated acts of writing, performing and meditating. Exploring the presence and experience character of the body-awareness relationship, a double perspective beyond cognitive fixations is suggested: 1) a body-centred touch of the world which inspires life as a creative ‘writing’ process, and 2) in line with Buddhist thought, an empty space of ‘pure presence’ from which all conscious processes originate.
The Routledge Handbook of Environmental History presents a cutting-edge overview of the dynamic and ever-expanding field of environmental history. It addresses recent transformations in the field and responses to shifting scholarly, political, and environmental landscapes. The handbook fully and critically engages with recent exciting changes, contextualizes them within longer-term shifts in the field, and charts potential new directions for study. It focuses on five key areas: Theories and concepts related to changing considerations of social justice, including postcolonial, antiracist, and feminist approaches, and the field’s growing emphasis on multiple human voices and agencies. The ro...