Seems you have not registered as a member of localhost.saystem.shop!
You may have to register before you can download all our books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
The Biosecurity Individual
Discoveries in biomedicine and biotechnology, especially in diagnostics, have made prevention and (self)surveillance increasingly important in the context of health practices. Frederike Offizier offers a cultural critique of the intersection between health, security and identity, and explores how the focus on risk and security changes our understanding of health and transforms our relationship to our bodies. Analyzing a wide variety of texts, from life writing to fiction, she offers a critical intervention on how this shift in the medical gaze produces new paradigms of difference and new biomedically facilitated identities: biosecurity individuals.
Biohacking, Bodies and Do-It-Yourself
From self-help books and nootropics, to self-tracking and home health tests, to the tinkering with technology and biological particles - biohacking brings biology, medicine, and the material foundation of life into the sphere of »do-it-yourself«. This trend has the potential to fundamentally change people's relationship with their bodies and biology but it also creates new cultural narratives of responsibility, authority, and differentiation. Covering a broad range of examples, this book explores practices and representations of biohacking in popular culture, discussing their ambiguous position between empowerment and requirement, promise and prescription.
Austerity, Community Action, and the Future of Citizenship in Europe
The politics of austerity has seen governments across Europe cut back on welfare provision. As the State retreats, this edited collection explores secular and faith-based grassroots social action in Germany and the United Kingdom that has evolved in response to changing economic policy and expanding needs, from basic items such as food to more complex means to move out of poverty. Bringing together scholars from different disciplines and practitioners in several areas of social intervention, the book explores how the conceptualization and constitutive practices of citizenship and community are changing because of the retreat of the State and the challenge of meeting social and material needs, creating new opportunities for local activism. The book provides new ways of thinking about social and political belonging and about the relations between individual, collective, and State responsibility.
Food Charity and the Psychologisation of Poverty
This book offers a unique discursive perspective on the rapid rise of food charity and how food poverty has emerged as a symptom of deeper problems requiring psychological intervention. Christian Möller explores how new anti-poverty programmes and advice cultures are psychologising poverty by locating causes and solutions inside the mind rather than in the outside world, and considers the political stakes in citizens becoming subjects of charity. Drawing extensively on Foucault alongside feminist and critical theory, the book puts forward an overdue challenge to the pervasive effects of a psychology, which limits our thinking about poverty with promises of development, happiness and resilie...
Exploring Communication through Qualitative Research
This volume offers an insight into contemporary communication studies, as seen through the lens of qualitative research. It presents existing studies on qualitative research, current research programs, and trends for future expansion of this methodological approach. It also offers a series of practical examples of applying methods and techniques of qualitative research, to teach readers about the social world and to answer pressing problems related to applied communication. In terms of research, the studies within the book use focus-group interviews, in-depth interviews, qualitative content analyses, critical discourse analyses, and dispositif analyses. The volume covers areas such as education, public relations, advertising, strategic communication, heritage and museum management and intercultural dialogue. It will be a useful aid for students of qualitative research in the social sciences and humanities, but also for professionals in the field of communication.
The Digital Condition
Our daily lives, our culture and our politics are now shaped by the digital condition as large numbers of people involve themselves in contentious negotiations of meaning in ever more dimensions of life, from the trivial to the profound. They are making use of the capacities of complex communication infrastructures, currently dominated by social mass media such as Twitter and Facebook, on which they have come to depend. Amidst a confusing plurality, Felix Stalder argues that are three key constituents of this condition: the use of existing cultural materials for one's own production, the way in which new meaning is established as a collective endeavour, and the underlying role of algorithms ...
The Big Data Agenda
This book highlights that the capacity for gathering, analysing, and utilising vast amounts of digital (user) data raises significant ethical issues. Annika Richterich provides a systematic contemporary overview of the field of critical data studies that reflects on practices of digital data collection and analysis. The book assesses in detail one big data research area: biomedical studies, focused on epidemiological surveillance. Specific case studies explore how big data have been used in academic work. The Big Data Agenda concludes that the use of big data in research urgently needs to be considered from the vantage point of ethics and social justice. Drawing upon discourse ethics and critical data studies, Richterich argues that entanglements between big data research and technology/ internet corporations have emerged. In consequence, more opportunities for discussing and negotiating emerging research practices and their implications for societal values are needed.
Ageing and Technology
The booming increase of the senior population has become a social phenomenon and a challenge to our societies, and technological advances have undoubtedly contributed to improve the lives of elderly citizens in numerous aspects. In current debates on technology, however, the »human factor« is often largely ignored. The ageing individual is rather seen as a malfunctioning machine whose deficiencies must be diagnosed or as a set of limitations to be overcome by means of technological devices. This volume aims at focusing on the perspective of human beings deriving from the development and use of technology: this change of perspective - taking the human being and not technology first - may help us to become more sensitive to the ambivalences involved in the interaction between humans and technology, as well as to adapt technologies to the people that created the need for its existence, thus contributing to improve the quality of life of senior citizens.
Lost in Perfection
The permanent struggle for optimisation can be seen as one of the most significant cultural principles of contemporary Western societies: the demand for improved performance and efficiency as well as the pursuit of self-improvement are con-sidered necessary in order to keep pace with an accelerated, competitive modern-ity. This affects not only work and education, but also family life, parent–child relationships and intimate relationships in respect to the body and the self, in regard to the public as well as the private realm. Bringing together contributions from renowned scholars from the fields of sociology, psychology and psycho-analysis, this book explores the impacts of optimisation on culture and psyche, examining the contradictions and limitations of optimisation, in conjunction with the effects of social transformations on individuals and shifts in regard to the meaning of ‘pathology’ and ‘normality’.
