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Social media has fundamentally transformed political life, driving a surge in far-right extremism. In recent years, radical anti-democratic ideologies have entered into the political mainstream, fueled by energy from extreme online environments. But why do far-right extremist movements seem to thrive so well on social media platforms? What takes place within the fringe online spaces that seem to function as incubators for violent extremists? To answer these questions, this book goes inside the “murder capital of the racist Internet”, examining 20 years of conversations on Stormfront.org. Using a combination of computational text analysis and close reading, we seek a deeper understanding ...
EPDF and EPUB available Open Access under CC-BY-NC-ND licence. Drawing on the study of different cities in the Global South, this book explores how the intensive use of data changes politics, power relations, and everyday life in contemporary cities. Across the volume, expert contributors show how urban actors, from the state to activists, are increasingly using data as a resource to empower their actions and support their claims, while also demonstrating how times of crisis are moments when the power of data is made visible. Focusing on the different dimensions of data power and politics in the urban realm, this is an important contribution to our understanding of how datafication transforms the places in which we live and how we experience them.
"We are living in an era of veritable STEM obsession. Not only do tech companies dominate our cultural imagination of American enterprise and financial growth, we urgently need science-based solutions to impending crises. As a society, we have poured enormous resources into cultivating young minds for STEM careers. The US sponsors 209 distinct STEM education programs in 13 different federal agencies at a cost of more than $3 billion. This spending is on top of countless initiatives from philanthropic foundations and corporate giving. And yet, we are facing a STEM worker crisis. In this project, sociologist John D. Skrentny asks, if we're investing so much in STEM education, why are as many a...
Providing a comprehensive overview of the urban sharing economy, this Modern Guide takes a forward-looking perspective on how sharing goods and services may facilitate future sustainability of consumption and production. It highlights recent developments and issues, with cutting-edge discussions from leading international scholars in business, engineering, environmental management, geography, law, planning, sociology and transport studies.
This book engages with the ethics and practices of identity formation in a world experiencing identity stress. It engages with crucial questions such as: What models are shaping our view of ourselves and the society in which we live? What images ground our perception of what is true and real? How have the images been historically produced? What are the effects of such models on definitions of self? Should we break free from these images if we get to know what they are? Is it possible to change our models in order to create freer identities? Through a range of distinctive lenses, the essays in the volume deals with the ideas of the ‘liminal self’, the ‘digital self’, ‘identities in flux’, and offers up ‘anthropologies of self/selves’ that situates current identity processes within their cultures and explores strategies and dilemmas from this perspective. This key volume will be of interest to scholars and researchers of literary stories, critical theory, social theory, social anthropology, philosophy, and political philosophy.
How to understand the mistakes we make about those on the other side of the political spectrum—and how they drive the affective polarization that is tearing us apart. It’s well known that the political divide in the United States—particularly between Democrats and Republicans—has grown to alarming levels in recent decades. Affective polarization—emotional polarization, or the hostility between the parties—has reached an unprecedented fever pitch. In Undue Hate, Daniel F. Stone tackles the biases undergirding affective polarization head-on. Stone explains why we often develop objectively false, and overly negative, beliefs about the other side—causing us to dislike them more tha...
When we're in the Certainty Trap, we tend to view people who disagree with us as hateful, ignorant, or just plain stupid. When it comes to heated social and political issues in particular, many of us know this feeling well— a consuming state of righteous indignation and moral outrage. And this response makes sense because our very certainty tells us that there are simple and obvious causes and solutions to the hot-button issues we care about most. But the things we care about the most are— far more often than not— morally and ethically complex. If the problems that divide us are inherently complicated, then a sense that the answers are obvious— and that anyone who disagrees must be d...
This book is the first attempt to provide a general theory of self-destruction in complex systems applicable to natural, social and cultural phenomena. The contributors work collaboratively to prove that many of the nondistributed complex systems in nature and society sooner or later experience critical development leading to unintended and irreversible self-annihilation. The individual chapters also show that the relations of such systems to their own distinctiveness and other systems may result in specific communicative pathologies (such as redundancy, inflation and noisy signalling) which tend to mitigate or reinforce each other, depending on circumstances. Finally, the volume updates som...
Hate speech has been extensively studied by disciplines such as social psychology, sociology, history, politics and law. Some significant areas of study have been the origins of hate speech in past and modern societies around the world; the way hate speech paves the way for harmful social movements; the socially destructive force of propaganda; and the legal responses to hate speech. On reviewing the literature, one major weakness stands out: hate speech, a crime perpetrated primarily by malicious and damaging language use, has no significant study in the field of linguistics. Historically, pragmatic theories have tended to address language as cooperative action, geared to reciprocally infor...