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A process through which skills, knowledge, and resources are expanded, capacity building, remains a tantalizing and pervasive concept throughout the field of anthropology, though it has received little in the way of critical analysis. By exploring the concept’s role in a variety of different settings including government lexicons, religious organizations, environmental campaigns, biomedical training, and fieldwork from around the globe, Hope and Insufficiency seeks to question the histories, assumptions, intentions, and enactments that have led to the ubiquity of capacity building, thereby developing a much-needed critical purchase on its persuasive power.
This volume presents a set of theoretically inventive pieces that engage with data across its many locations, from government databases to ecological field stations, from kitchen tables to concrete bunkers. Contributors demonstrate how thinking with data can be conceptually generative for anthropology, prompting us to reconsider our understanding of topics including bodies, persons, and the social itself Shows how 'big' data which may have once seemed limited to business or high tech, ethnographers are now finding data – and its attendant values and practices – in their field sites around the world Examines how data has motivated a sweep of dystopian visions, signaling the invasion of privacy, political manipulation, or shadowy data doubles Discusses how anthropologists have been cautious in taking data itself as an object of theoretical interest, even as the effects of data become manifest in our ethnographies By putting data in its place, the chapters collected here develop conceptual tools that will prove useful for anthropologists who find 'data' in their data
This Handbook offers an overview of the thriving and diverse field of anthropological studies of technology. It features 39 original chapters, each reviewing the state of the art of current research and enlivening the field of study through ethnographic analysis of human-technology interfaces, forms of social organisation, technological practices and/or systems of belief and meaning in different parts of the world. The Handbook is organised around some of the most important characteristics of anthropological studies of technology today: the diverse knowledge practices that technologies involve and on which they depend; the communities, collectives, and categories that emerge around technolog...
In the thirty-five years since the first +test-tube baby,[&½] in-vitro fertilization and other methods of reproductive assistance have become a common aspect of family life and medicine in affluent nations and, increasingly, throughout the world. How do persons seeking treatment, donors, and medical experts make use of these reproductive technologies? How in crossing borders between nations do they manage to evade legal and bioethical regulations? And how do they make sense of these new modes of making kinship against the backdrop of diverse world-views and social settings? --
Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Guangdong, China, this book asks: what does it mean for Chinese non-heterosexual people to go against existing state regulations and societal norms to form a desirable and legible queer family? Chapters explore the various tactics queer people employ to have children and to form queer or ‘rainbow’ families. The book unpacks people’s experiences of cultivating, or losing, kinship relations through their negotiation with biological relatives, cultural conventions and state legislations. Through its analysis, the book offers a new ethnographic perspective for queer studies and anthropology of kinship.
Global Perspectives on Digital Literature: A Critical Introduction for the Twenty-First Century explores how digital literary forms shape and are shaped by aesthetic and political exchanges happening across languages and nations. The book understands "global" as a mode of comparative thinking and argues for considering various forms of digital literature—the popular, the avant-garde, and the participatory—as realizing and producing global thought in the twenty-first century. Attending to issues of both political and aesthetic representation, the book includes a diverse group of contributors and a wide-ranging corpus of texts, composed in a variety of languages and regions, including East...
This book explores the work of important authors in the search for a transition towards more ethical design focused on more-than-human coexistence. In a time of environmental crises in which the human species threatens its own survival and the highest level of exacerbation of the idea of a future and technological innovation, it is important to discard certain anthropocentric categories in order to situate design beyond the role that it traditionally held in the capitalist world, creating opportunities to create more just and sustainable worlds. This book is an invitation to travel new paths for design framed by ethics of more-than-human coexistence that breaks with the unsustainability inst...
This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the IFIP WG 8.2 Working Conference on Information Systems and Organizations, IS&O 2018, held in San Francisco, CA, USA, in December 2018. The 11 revised full papers presented together with one short paper and 2 keynote papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 47 submissions. The papers are organized in the following topical sections: setting the stage; social implications of algorithmic phenomena; hybrid agency and the performativity of technology; and living with monsters.
Urban Arabesques examines philosophy as an event of the city and the city as an event of philosophy and how the intertwining of the two generates an urban imaginary. This critique-in-motion of creative figures and conceptual personae from (non) philosophy illuminates the emergence of sense in the city, shows how “transcendental empiricism” operates within it, and how the everyday life of the streets—the ordinariness of experience as well as the screen/projector of urban surfaces—uncovers new pathways for politics, experience, and relationalities. Using Hong Kong as the primary site of thinking yet recognizing that thinking incessantly moves beyond any particular location, the book opens up cities within the city. Traversing Hong Kong reveals how the corners, the money, the trees and the water are involved in philosophy. Combining the linguistic approach found in Heidegger and Derrida, with the more materialist analysis of Serres and Deleuze, the objective of this book is to retheorize the urban and its imaginary—its virtuality, irreality, phantasmicity—with an emphasis on signs, images and rhythms, resonating through philosophy, and beyond.