A Guidebook of Alternative Nows

A Guidebook of Alternative Nows PDF Author: Amber Hickey
Publisher: Journal of Aesthetics & Protest
ISBN: 9780615649726
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 263

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Book Description
Imagining other versions of now can be difficult without concrete examples, and where can they be found when so many signs tell us that the world is spiraling downward: more and more economically unsound, environmentally crisis-ridden, and lacking in obvious avenues for everyday people to make their voices and visions heard.With particular fervor since the global financial crisis erupted in 2007, however, creative movers and shakers, with stars in their eyes and dirt under their fingernails, have been dreaming up projects and ideas in the areas of ecologies, economies, communities, histories, spaces, and resources. These propositions range from witty to earnest, from utopian to pragmatic. Bursting with street-smart optimism, what they share is belief in the possibility of creating versions of now not yet fully manifest. A Guidebook of Alternative Nows is composed of a collection of these projects and ideas; flares of inspiration with clear practical resonance in this time of potential radical transformation.A Guidebook of Alternative Nows is not intended to pinpoint the next big solution. Instead, it seeks to shed light on a cacophony of potentialities and realities, all of which may compose a part of our nows and our futures.

A Guidebook of Alternative Nows

A Guidebook of Alternative Nows PDF Author: Amber Hickey
Publisher: Journal of Aesthetics & Protest
ISBN: 9780615649726
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 263

Get Book Here

Book Description
Imagining other versions of now can be difficult without concrete examples, and where can they be found when so many signs tell us that the world is spiraling downward: more and more economically unsound, environmentally crisis-ridden, and lacking in obvious avenues for everyday people to make their voices and visions heard.With particular fervor since the global financial crisis erupted in 2007, however, creative movers and shakers, with stars in their eyes and dirt under their fingernails, have been dreaming up projects and ideas in the areas of ecologies, economies, communities, histories, spaces, and resources. These propositions range from witty to earnest, from utopian to pragmatic. Bursting with street-smart optimism, what they share is belief in the possibility of creating versions of now not yet fully manifest. A Guidebook of Alternative Nows is composed of a collection of these projects and ideas; flares of inspiration with clear practical resonance in this time of potential radical transformation.A Guidebook of Alternative Nows is not intended to pinpoint the next big solution. Instead, it seeks to shed light on a cacophony of potentialities and realities, all of which may compose a part of our nows and our futures.

Citizens of Worlds

Citizens of Worlds PDF Author: Jennifer Gabrys
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 1452967997
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 393

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Book Description
An unparalleled how-to guide to citizen-sensing practices that monitor air pollution Modern environments are awash with pollutants churning through the air, from toxic gases and intensifying carbon to carcinogenic particles and novel viruses. The effects on our bodies and our planet are perilous. Citizens of Worlds is the first thorough study of the increasingly widespread use of digital technologies to monitor and respond to air pollution. It presents practice-based research on working with communities and making sensor toolkits to detect pollution while examining the political subjects, relations, and worlds these technologies generate. Drawing on data from the Citizen Sense research group, which worked with communities in the United States and the United Kingdom to develop digital-sensor toolkits, Jennifer Gabrys argues that citizen-oriented technologies promise positive change but then collide with entrenched and inequitable power structures. She asks: Who or what constitutes a “citizen” in citizen sensing? How do digital sensing technologies enable or constrain environmental citizenship? Spanning three project areas, this study describes collaborations to monitor air pollution from fracking infrastructure, to document emissions in urban environments, and to create air-quality gardens. As these projects show, how people respond to, care for, and struggle to transform environmental conditions informs the political subjects and collectives they become as they strive for more breathable worlds.

Karl Polanyi

Karl Polanyi PDF Author: Gareth Dale
Publisher: Polity
ISBN: 0745640710
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 320

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Book Description
Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation is generally acclaimed as being among the most influential works of economic history in the twentieth century, and remains as vital in the current historical conjuncture as it was in his own. In its critique of nineteenth-century ‘market fundamentalism’ it reads as a warning to our own neoliberal age, and is widely touted as a prophetic guidebook for those who aspire to understand the causes and dynamics of global economic turbulence at the end of the 2000s. Karl Polanyi: The Limits of the Market is the first comprehensive introduction to Polanyi’s ideas and legacy. It assesses not only the texts for which he is famous – prepared during his spells in American academia – but also his journalistic articles written in his first exile in Vienna, and lectures and pamphlets from his second exile, in Britain. It provides a detailed critical analysis of The Great Transformation, but also surveys Polanyi’s seminal writings in economic anthropology, the economic history of ancient and archaic societies, and political and economic theory. Its primary source base includes interviews with Polanyi’s daughter, Kari Polanyi-Levitt, as well as the entire compass of his own published and unpublished writings in English and German. This engaging and accessible introduction to Polanyi’s thinking will appeal to students and scholars across the social sciences, providing a refreshing perspective on the roots of our current economic crisis.

Another Now

Another Now PDF Author: Yanis Varoufakis
Publisher: Melville House
ISBN: 1612199569
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 241

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Book Description
What would a fair and equal society actually look like? The world-renowned economist and bestselling author Yanis Varoufakis presents his radical and subversive answer in a work of speculative fiction that recalls William Morris and William Gibson The year: 2035. At a funeral for Iris, a revolutionary leftist feminist, Yango is approached by Costa, Iris’s closest comrade, who urges him to carry out Iris’s last wish: plough into her secret diaries to tell their story. “But”, Costa insists “leave out anything that might help Big Tech replicate my technologies!” That night Yango delves into Iris’s diaries. In them he discovers a chronicle of how Costa’s revolutionary technologies had unveiled an actually existing, fully democratized, postcapitalist society. Suddenly he understands Costa’s obsession with the hackers trying to steal his secrets. So begins Yanis Varoufakis’s extraordinary novelistic thought-experiment, where the world-famous economist offers an invigorating and deeply moving vision of an alternative reality. Another Now tells the story of Costa, a brilliant but deeply disillusioned, computer engineer, who creates a revolutionary technology that will allow the user a “glimpse of a life beyond their dreams” but will not enslave them. But an accident during one of its trial runs unveils a cosmic wormhole where Costa meets his DNA double, who is living in a 2025 very different than the one Costa is living in. In this parallel 2025 a global hi-tech uprising, begun in the wake of the collapse of 2008, has birthed a post-capitalist world in which work, money, land, digital networks and politics have been truly democratized. Banks have been eliminated, as well as predatory, data-mining digital monopolies; the gig economy is no more; and the young are free to experiment with different careers and to study ”non-lucrative topics, from Sumerian pottery to astrophysics.” Intoxicated, Costa travels to England to tell Iris, his old comrade, and her neighbor, Eva, a recovering banker turned neoliberal economics professor, of the parallel universe he has discovered. Costa eventually leads them back to his workshop in America where Iris and Eva meet their own doubles, and confront hard truths about themselves and the daunting political challenge that "the Other Now" presents. But, as their obsession with the Other Now deepens, time begins to run out, as the wormhole begins to deteriorate and hackers begin to unleash new attacks on Costa’s technology. The trio have to make a choice: which 2025 do they want to live in? Varoufakis has been claiming for a while that we already live in postcapitalist times. That, since the 2008 crisis, capitalism has been morphing into technofeudalism. Another Now, a riveting work of speculative fiction, shows that there is a realistic, democratic alternative to the technofeudalpostcapitalist dystopia taking shape all around us. It also confronts us with the greatest question: how far are we willing to go to bring it about?

Start Now!

Start Now! PDF Author: Rudolf Steiner
Publisher: SteinerBooks
ISBN: 9780880105262
Category : Body, Mind & Spirit
Languages : en
Pages : 274

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Book Description
Start Now! offers an extensive and representative sample of Steiner's spiritual instructions and meditative practices, including meditation instructions; mantric verses; daily, weekly and monthly practices for the development of soul qualities; karmic exercises and meditations for working with the dead, the angelic hierarchies and our guardian angel.

Graphic USA

Graphic USA PDF Author: Ziggy Hanaor
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780956205322
Category : Cities and towns
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Graphic USA is like having hip, insightful chaperones in multiple cities across the United States: graphic designers living in 25 metropolises (from capitals of cool like New York, Portland, Miami and L.A. to less predictable locales such as Anchorage or Charleston.

Reading Contemporary Performance

Reading Contemporary Performance PDF Author: Gabrielle Cody
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136246568
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 508

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Book Description
As the nature of contemporary performance continues to expand into new forms, genres and media, it requires an increasingly diverse vocabulary. Reading Contemporary Performance provides students, critics and creators with a rich understanding of the key terms and ideas that are central to any discussion of this evolving theatricality. Specially commissioned entries from a wealth of contributors map out the many and varied ways of discussing performance in all of its forms – from theatrical and site-specific performances to live and New Media art. The book is divided into two sections: Concepts - Key terms and ideas arranged according to the five characteristic elements of performance art: time; space; action; performer; audience. Methodologies and Turning Points - The seminal theories and ways of reading performance, such as postmodernism, epic theatre, feminisms, happenings and animal studies. Case Studies – entries in both sections are accompanied by short studies of specific performances and events, demonstrating creative examples of the ideas and issues in question. Three different introductory essays provide multiple entry points into the discussion of contemporary performance, and cross-references for each entry also allow the plotting of one’s own pathway. Reading Contemporary Performance is an invaluable guide, providing not just a solid set of familiarities, but an exploration and contextualisation of this broad and vital field.

The ABC of the projectariat

The ABC of the projectariat PDF Author: Kuba Szreder
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 1526161338
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 185

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Book Description
The ABC of the projectariat contributes new thinking on and practical responses to the widespread problem of precarious labour in the field of contemporary art. It works as both a critical analysis and a practical handbook, speaking to and about the vast cohort of artistic freelancers worldwide. In an accessible ABC format, the book strikes a unique balance between the practical and the theoretical: the analysis is backed up by lived experience, the arguments are rooted in concrete examples and there are suggestions for constructive action. Roughly half of the entries expose the structural underpinnings of projects and circulation, isolating traits such as opportunism, neoliberalism, inequality, fear and cynicism at the root of the condition of the projectariat. This discussion is paired with a practical account of different modes of action, such as art strikes, productive withdrawals, political struggles and better social time machines. Just as proletarians had nothing to lose but their chains, the projectarians have nothing to miss but their deadlines.

Speculate This!

Speculate This! PDF Author: Uncertain Commons uncertain commons
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822376938
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 126

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Book Description
Speculate This! is a concise, provocative manifesto advocating practices of "affirmative speculation" over and against contemporary forms of speculation that quantify and contain risk to generate financial profit for a privileged few. This latter mode of speculation is predatory and familiar, its fallout evident in ongoing environmental degradation, in restrictive legal claims on natural resources in distant lands, and in the foreclosures, evictions, and unemployment resulting from the financial collapse of 2007–08. While such exploitive speculation seeks to reduce uncertainty and pin down the future, the affirmative practices championed by the authors of Speculate This! engage uncertainty, contingency, and difference, and they multiply, rather than reduce, possible futures. In these affirmative practices, social relations and the creation of goods and knowledge are not driven by the desire for financial gain or professional status. Whether manifest in open-source software, eco-communes, global activist movements, community credit networks, or experimental art, speculative living affirms our commonality. As a collaborative work coauthored by a group of anonymous scholars, Speculate This! argues for and embodies affirmative speculation.

More Powerful Together

More Powerful Together PDF Author: Jen Gobby
Publisher: Fernwood Publishing
ISBN: 1773632515
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 249

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Book Description
How can social movements help bring about large-scale systems change? This is the question Jen Gobby sets out to answer in More Powerful Together. As an activist, Gobby has been actively involved with climate justice, anti-pipeline, and Indigenous land defense movements in Canada for many years. As a researcher, she has sat down with folks from these movements and asked them to reflect on their experiences with movement building. Bringing their incredibly poignant insights into dialogue with scholarly and activist literature on transformation, Gobby weaves together a powerful story about how change happens. In reflecting on what’s working and what’s not working in these movements, taking inventory of the obstacles hindering efforts, and imagining the strategies for building a powerful movement of movements, a common theme emerges: relationships are crucial to building movements strong enough to transform systems. Indigenous scholarship, ecological principles, and activist reflections all converge on the insight that the means and ends of radical transformation is in forging relationships of equality and reciprocity with each other and with the land. It is through this, Gobby argues, that we become more powerful together. 100% of the royalties made from the sales of this book are being donated to Indigenous Climate Action www.indigenousclimateaction.com