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The land between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan Valley has been one of the most disputed territories in history. Since the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948, Palestinians and Israelis have each sought claim to the national identity of the land through various martial, social, and scientific tactics, but no method has offered as much legitimacy and national controversy as that of the map. The Politics of Maps delves beneath the battlefield to unearth the cartographic strife behind the Israel/Palestine conflict. Blending science and technology studies, sociology, and geography with a host of archival material, in-depth interviews and ethnographies, this book explores how the g...
Tracing the development of the Moog synthesizer from its initial conception to its ascension to stardom in 'Switched-on Bach', this text conveys the consequences of a technology that would provide the soundtrack for a chapter in cultural history.
25 Years Berlin Republic takes stock of the state of German unification a quarter of a century into the ongoing project that is the Berlin Republic. Thirteen scholars, artists, and public figures from diverse backgrounds document the changing hopes and fears, successes and challenges, that face the republic as it negotiates its way through the 21st century. Taking up a broad assessment of German culture ranging from sports to religion, painting to map-making, film to foreign policy, these studies combine personal experiences with critical analysis in order to understand the Berlin Republic today. The resulting portrait reveals a complex, diverse, and constantly-developing Republic that continues to ask the same essential question that has been at the center of discussions since the dramatic events that gave birth to the Republic: "Sind wir ein Volk?"
Why do humans get angry with objects? Why is it that a malfunctioning computer, a broken tool, or a fallen glass causes an outbreak of fury? How is it possible to speak of an inanimate object's recalcitrance, obstinacy, or even malice? When things assume a will of their own and seem to act out against human desires and wishes rather than disappear into automatic, unconscious functionality, the breakdown is experienced not as something neutral but affectively--as rage or as outbursts of laughter. Such emotions are always psychosocial: public, rhetorically performed, and therefore irreducible to a "private" feeling. By investigating the minutest details of life among dysfunctional household items through the discourses of philosophy and science, as well as in literary works by Laurence Sterne, Jean Paul, Friedrich Theodor Vischer, and Heimito von Doderer, Kreienbrock reconsiders the modern bourgeois poetics that render things the way we know and suffer them.
When do words and actions empower? When do they betray? Based on ethnographic fieldwork, this volume tracks the repercussions of advocacy activism against house demolitions in 'unrecognised' Arab-Bedouin villages in Israel's southern 'internal frontier'. It highlights the repercussions of activism for victims, fund-raisers and activists. The ethnographic episodes show how humanitarian aid intervention and indigenous identity politics can turn into a double-edged sword. Ironically, institutional lobbying for coexistence and its interpretative categories can sometimes perpetuate different forms of subjugation. The volume also shows how, beyond the institutional lobbying, novel figures of activ...
The project to create a 'New Man' and 'New Woman' initiated in the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc constituted one of the most extensive efforts to remake human psychophysiology in modern history. Playing on the different meanings of the word 'technology' - as practice, knowledge and artefact - this edited volume brings together scholarship from across a range of fields to shed light on the ways in which socialist regimes in the Soviet bloc and Eastern Europe sought to transform and revolutionise human capacities. From external, state-driven techniques of social control and bodily management, through institutional practices of transformation, to strategies of self-fashioning, Technologies ...
This volume provides a history of how “the human” has been constituted as a subject of scientific inquiry in China from the seventeenth century to the present. Organized around four themes—“Parameters of Human Life,” “Formations of the Human Subject,” “Disciplining Knowledge,” and “Deciphering Health”—it scrutinizes the development of scientific knowledge and technical interest in human organization within an evolving Chinese society. Spanning the Ming-Qing, Republican, and contemporary periods, its twenty-four original, synthetic chapters ground the mutual construction of “China” and “the human” in concrete historical contexts. As a state-of-the-field survey, a definitive textbook for teaching, and an authoritative reference that guides future research, this book pushes Sinology, comparative cultural studies, and the history of science in new directions.
An examination of how the technical choices, social hierarchies, economic structures, and political dynamics shaped the Soviet nuclear industry leading up to Chernobyl. The Chernobyl disaster has been variously ascribed to human error, reactor design flaws, and industry mismanagement. Six former Chernobyl employees were convicted of criminal negligence; they defended themselves by pointing to reactor design issues. Other observers blamed the Soviet style of ideologically driven economic and industrial management. In Producing Power, Sonja Schmid draws on interviews with veterans of the Soviet nuclear industry and extensive research in Russian archives as she examines these alternate accounts...
The fourth edition of an authoritative overview, with all new chapters that capture the state of the art in a rapidly growing field. Science and Technology Studies (STS) is a flourishing interdisciplinary field that examines the transformative power of science and technology to arrange and rearrange contemporary societies. The Handbook of Science and Technology Studies provides a comprehensive and authoritative overview of the field, reviewing current research and major theoretical and methodological approaches in a way that is accessible to both new and established scholars from a range of disciplines. This new edition, sponsored by the Society for Social Studies of Science, is the fourth i...
"This book explores the economic norms embedded within psychiatric thinking about mental illness in the North Atlantic world. Over the course of the nineteenth century, the concept of madness was subjected to an economically saturated style of psychiatric reasoning. Psychiatrists across Western Europe and the United States attributed financial and even moral value to an array of pathological conditions, such that some mental disorders were seen as financial assets and others as economic liabilities. By turning to economic conduct and asking whether patients, such as eccentrics, appeared capable of managing their financial affairs and money, psychiatrists could often circumvent uncertainties ...