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This book tells a series of living stories about a domain of social activity, “the work and play of the mind,” in a particular historical epoch: the “information age.” The stories concern political processes and movements as varied as the World Trade Organization’s Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights, China’s Great Firewall, practices of image sharing in social media, Occupy Wall Street, The Arab Spring, The Alt-Right, and the use of geographical indications by indigenous peoples and farmers to defend their lifestyles. In its theoretical analysis, the book illuminates four alternative political agendas for the work and play of the mind. These four “propertysca...
Virtual learning environments are crucial portals for students to take full advantage of the educational process, especially as we have seen a rise in the use of such environments due to the COVID-19 pandemic. A next-generation virtual learning environment, called Common Ground Scholar (CGScholar), has been researched, developed, and employed in different scenarios, countries, and domains. Promoting Next-Generation Learning Environments Through CGScholar provides first-hand experience on how this innovative social network-like learning environment has changed the way students interact with their teachers, the content, and their peers. It outlines all conceptual and philosophical underpinnings that have enabled the realization of a next-generation virtual learning environment that assists educators and learners. Covering topics such as community-based peer review process, medical education, and collaborative affordance, this premier reference source is an essential resource for educators and administrators of both K-12 and higher education, pre-service teachers, teacher educators, librarians, government officials, researchers, and academicians.
Middlescapes tells the story of an imaginary place, found in reality. A place where at once we can see the speculative and critical of the modern American vernacular. In an inventory of past utopias, materialized in lines of corn, barns, constructed environments, and human forms, we are offered a reflection on the subtle interplay of history caught in an infinite loop - past futures, future pasts. "These are our Middlescapes. Yesterday and tomorrow. Mine, yours, ours."
From the rise of cyberbullying and hactivism to the issues surrounding digital privacy rights and freedom of speech, the Internet is changing the ways in which we govern and are governed as citizens. This book examines how citizens encounter and perform new sorts of rights, duties, opportunities and challenges through the Internet. By disrupting prevailing understandings of citizenship and cyberspace, the authors highlight the dynamic relationship between these two concepts. Rather than assuming that these are static or established “facts” of politics and society, the book shows how the challenges and opportunities presented by the Internet inevitably impact upon the action and understan...
Much of the South African government’s response to crime—especially in Johannesburg—has been to rely increasingly on technology. This includes the widespread use of video cameras, Artificial Intelligence, machine-learning, and automated systems, effectively replacing human watchers with machine watchers. The aggregate effect of such steps is to determine who is, and isn’t, allowed to be in public spaces—essentially another way to continue segregation. In The Infrastructures of Security, author Martin J. Murray concentrates on not only the turn toward technological solutions to managing the risk of crime through digital (and software-based) surveillance and automated information sys...
Analyzing the relationship between digital technologies and society this book explores a wide range of complex social issues emerging in a new digital space. Itexamines both the vexing dilemmas with a critical eye as well as prompting readers to think constructively and strategically about exciting possibilities.
This book documents the contributions of architects Jack Sherman Baker, John Gordon Replinger, A. Richard Williams, Robert Louis Amico, and Jeffery S. Poss to the Midwest's built environment. All were keenly aware of the prairie landscape of Central Illinois, its vast vistas, and the prismatic forms of houses, barns, and granaries that punctuate the horizon. Together, we tell the story of their work, the "Champaign School of Mid-Century Architecture," and the people who live, use, and care for these buildings.
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 en...
In 1918 a young Carl Schmitt published a short satirical fiction entitled The Buribunks. He imagined a future society of beings who consistently wrote and disseminated their personal diaries. Schmitt would go on to become the infamous philosopher of the exception and for a while the ‘Crown Jurist of the Third Reich’. The Buribunks – ironically for beings that lived only for self-memorialisation – has been mostly lost to history. However, the digital realm, with its emphasis on the informatic traces generated by human doing, and the continual interest in Schmitt’s work to explain and criticise contemporary constellations of power, suggests that The Buribunks is a text whose epoch ha...