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Rice
Rice is a first step toward a history of rice and its place in capitalism from global and comparative perspectives.
The Development Century
Offers cutting-edge perspectives on how international development has shaped the global history of the modern world.
The Komedi Bioscoop
This fascinating study of early cinema in the Netherlands Indies explores the influences of new media technology on colonial society. The Komedi Bioscoop traces the emergence of a local culture of movie-going in the Netherlands Indies (present-day Indonesia) from 1896 until 1914. It outlines the introduction of the new technology by independent touring exhibitors, the constitution of a market for moving picture shows, the embedding of moving picture exhibitions within the local popular entertainment scene, and the Dutch colonial authorities’ efforts to control film consumption and distribution. Dafna Ruppin focuses on the cinema as a social institution in which technology, race, and colonialism converged. In her illuminating study, moving picture venues in the Indies—ranging from canvas or bamboo tents to cinema palaces of brick and stone—are perceived as liminal spaces in which daily interactions across boundaries could occur within colonial Indonesia’s multi-ethnic and increasingly polarized colonial society.
Humanitarian Engineering
Humanitarian Engineering reviews the development of engineering as a distinct profession and of the humanitarian movement as a special socio-political practice. Having noted that the two developments were situated in the same geographical and historical space -- that is, in Europe and North America beginning in the 1700s -- the book argues for a mutual influence and synthesis that has previously been lacking. In this spirit, the first of two central chapters describes humanitarian engineering as the artful drawing on science to direct the resources of nature with active compassion to meet the basic needs of all -- especially the powerless, poor, or otherwise marginalized. A second central chapter then considers strategies for education in humanitarian engineering so conceived. Two final chapters consider challenges and implications. Table of Contents: Engineering / Humanitarianism / Humanitarian Engineering / Humanitarian Engineering Education / Challenges / Conclusion: Humanizing Technology
Island Tinkerers
How Taiwan rose to global prominence in high tech manufacturing, from computer maker to the world’s leading chip manufacturer. How did Taiwan, a former Japanese colony and the last fortress of the defeated Chinese Nationalists, ascend to such heights in high-tech manufacturing? In Island Tinkerers, Honghong Tinn tells the critical history of how hobbyists and enthusiasts in Taiwan, including engineers, technologists, technocrats, computer users, and engineers-turned-entrepreneurs, helped transform the country with their hands-on engagement with computers. Rather than engaging in wholesale imitation of US sources, she explains, these technologists tinkered with imported computing technology...
Consumers in the Country
From 1900 to 1960, the introduction and development of four so-called urbanizing technologies–the telephone, automobile, radio, and electric light and power–transformed the rural United States. But did these new technologies revolutionize rural life in the ways modernizers predicted? And how exactly–and with what levels of resistance and acceptance–did this change take place? In Consumers in the Country Ronald R. Kline, avoiding the trap of technological determinism, explores the changing relationships among the Country Life professionals, government agencies, sales people, and others who promoted these technologies and the farm families who largely succeeded in adapting them to rural culture.
Competing with the Soviets
For most of the second half of the twentieth century, the United States and its allies competed with a hostile Soviet Union in almost every way imaginable except open military engagement. The Cold War placed two opposite conceptions of the good society before the uncommitted world and history itself, and science figured prominently in the picture. Competing with the Soviets offers a short, accessible introduction to the special role that science and technology played in maintaining state power during the Cold War, from the atomic bomb to the Human Genome Project. The high-tech machinery of nuclear physics and the space race are at the center of this story, but Audra J. Wolfe also examines th...
Engineers and the Making of the Francoist Regime
How engineers and agricultural scientists became key actors inFranco's regime and Spain's forced modernization.
How Users Matter
Users have become an integral part of technology studies. The essays in this volume look at the creative capacity of users to shape technology in all phases, from design to implementation. Using a variety of theoretical approaches, including a feminist focus on users and use (in place of the traditional emphasis on men and machines), concepts from semiotics, and the cultural studies view of consumption as a cultural activity, these essays examine what users do with technology and, in turn, what technology does to users. The contributors consider how users consume, modify, domesticate, design, reconfigure, and resist technological development—and how users are defined and transformed by tec...
The Nature of Data
When we look at some of the most pressing issues in environmental politics today, it is hard to avoid data technologies. Big data, artificial intelligence, and data dashboards all promise "revolutionary" advances in the speed and scale at which governments, corporations, conservationists, and even individuals can respond to environmental challenges. By bringing together scholars from geography, anthropology, science and technology studies, and ecology, The Nature of Data explores how the digital realm is a significant site in which environmental politics are waged. This collection as a whole makes the argument that we cannot fully understand the current conjuncture in critical, global enviro...
