DIY Utopia

DIY Utopia PDF Author: Amber Day
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 1498523897
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 291

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Book Description
At first glance, contemporary popular culture, filled with bleak images of the future, seems to have given up on the possibility of positive collective change. Below the surface, however, alternative culture is rife with artist-led projects, activist movements, and subcultural communities of interest that seek to spark the collective imagination and to encourage hunger for alternatives. More playfully self-conscious than past utopian movements, today’s are often whimsical or ironic, but are still entirely earnest. Artists invite us to re-author city maps, or archive individual ideas for the future, while maker collectives urge us to rethink our relationship to consumer goods. All seem to have grown out of a similar do-it-yourself ethos and alternative culture. One of the central conflicts informing these case studies is that while it remains immensely difficult to envision anything outside of the current system of consumer capitalism, there is nevertheless a powerful desire to take it apart in piecemeal ways. We see the longing for new social and political narratives, new forms of communion and sociability, and new imaginings of the possible, longings that are currently unmet by mainstream culture, but that are taking expression in myriad ways at the local level. Taken as a whole, this collection examines what our grand ideals and playful daydreams tell us about ourselves.

DIY Utopia

DIY Utopia PDF Author: Amber Day
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 1498523897
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 291

Get Book Here

Book Description
At first glance, contemporary popular culture, filled with bleak images of the future, seems to have given up on the possibility of positive collective change. Below the surface, however, alternative culture is rife with artist-led projects, activist movements, and subcultural communities of interest that seek to spark the collective imagination and to encourage hunger for alternatives. More playfully self-conscious than past utopian movements, today’s are often whimsical or ironic, but are still entirely earnest. Artists invite us to re-author city maps, or archive individual ideas for the future, while maker collectives urge us to rethink our relationship to consumer goods. All seem to have grown out of a similar do-it-yourself ethos and alternative culture. One of the central conflicts informing these case studies is that while it remains immensely difficult to envision anything outside of the current system of consumer capitalism, there is nevertheless a powerful desire to take it apart in piecemeal ways. We see the longing for new social and political narratives, new forms of communion and sociability, and new imaginings of the possible, longings that are currently unmet by mainstream culture, but that are taking expression in myriad ways at the local level. Taken as a whole, this collection examines what our grand ideals and playful daydreams tell us about ourselves.

DIY Utopia

DIY Utopia PDF Author: Amber Day
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781498523882
Category : Consumption (Economics)
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
This collection examines contemporary artist and activist-inspired utopian projects and DIY communities of interest. Throwing into relief the immense difficulty of thinking beyond the current system of consumer capitalism, coupled with the powerful desire to do just that, this anthology explores what our ideals and desires tell us about ourselves.

DIY Urbanism in Africa

DIY Urbanism in Africa PDF Author: Stephen Marr
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1786999064
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 389

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Book Description
Protracted economic crises, accelerating inequalities, and increased resource scarcity present significant challenges for the majority of Africa's urban population. Limited state capacity and widespread infrastructure deficiencies common in cities across the continent often require residents to draw on their own resources, knowledge, and expertise to resolve these life and livelihood dilemmas. DIY Urbanism in Africa investigates these practices. It develops a theoretical framework through which to analyze them, and it presents a series of case studies to demonstrate how residents invent new DIY tactics and strategies in response to security, place-making, or economic problems. This book offers a timely critical intervention into literatures on urban development and politics in Africa. It is valuable to students, policymakers, and urban practitioners keen to understand the mechanisms and political implications of widespread dynamics now shaping Africa's expanding urban environments.

Utopia

Utopia PDF Author: Thomas More
Publisher: Penguin UK
ISBN: 0141901659
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 166

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Book Description
In Utopia, More paints a vision of the customs and practices of a distant island, but Utopia means 'no place' and his narrator's name, Hythlodaeus, translates as 'dispenser of nonsense'. This fantastical tale masks what is a serious and subversive analysis of the failings of More's society. Advocating instead a world in which there is religious tolerance, provision for the aged, and state ownership of land, Utopia has been variously claimed as a Catholic tract or an argument for communism andit still invites each generation to make its own interpretation.

How Do We Build a Utopia?

How Do We Build a Utopia? PDF Author: Adam Fotos
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781522843672
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 24

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Book Description
A collection of drawings exploring how to build a utopia from a Saturday Studio class with Adam Fotos through the Chicago Architecture Foundation for the 2015 Chicago Architecture Biennial.

Culinary Turn

Culinary Turn PDF Author: Nicolaj van der Meulen
Publisher: transcript Verlag
ISBN: 3839430313
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 327

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Book Description
Kitchen, cooking, nutrition, and eating have become omnipresent cultural topics. They stand at the center of design, gastronomy, nutrition science, and agriculture. Artists have appropriated cooking as an aesthetic practice - in turn, cooks are adapting the staging practices that go with an artistic self-image. This development is accompanied by crisis of eating behaviour and a philosophy of cooking as a speculative cultural technique. This volume investigates the dimensions of a new culinary turn, combining for the very first time contributions from the theory and practice of cooking.

Gaming Utopia

Gaming Utopia PDF Author: Claudia Costa Pederson
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0253054508
Category : Games & Activities
Languages : en
Pages : 281

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Book Description
In Gaming Utopia: Ludic Worlds in Art, Design, and Media, Claudia Costa Pederson analyzes modernist avant-garde and contemporary video games to challenge the idea that gaming is an exclusively white, heterosexual, male, corporatized leisure activity and reenvisions it as a catalyst for social change. By looking at over fifty projects that together span a century and the world, Pederson explores the capacity for sociopolitical commentary in virtual and digital realms and highlights contributions to the history of gaming by women, queer, and transnational artists. The result is a critical tool for understanding video games as imaginative forms of living that offer alternatives to our current reality. With an interdisciplinary approach, Gaming Utopia emphasizes how game design, creation, and play can become political forms of social protest and examines the ways that games as art open doors to a more just and peaceful world.

The Philosophy of Utopia

The Philosophy of Utopia PDF Author: Barbara Goodwin
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136337636
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
This collection addresses the important function of utopianism in social and political philosophy and includes debate on what its future role will be in a period dominated by dystopian nightmare scenarios.

We-commerce

We-commerce PDF Author: Billee Howard
Publisher: TarcherPerigee
ISBN: 0399173625
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 210

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Book Description
Named an Inc. Business Beach Read for Summer 2016! In WE-Commerce, visionary marketing strategist Billee Howard lays out her plan for a new vision of success and long-term, purposeful profitability in the new global, sharing economy Today, the most successful businesses and entrepreneurs thrive through connectivity, socialization, and sharing. It is an age of WE-Commerce, an economy centered on the power of "we" instead of "me," focused on the needs of the many over the few. Booming companies such as Uber and Airbnb leverage technology to create platforms that rely largely on social media and community feedback to facilitate people's ability to collaborate with one another. Instead of traditional business strategies, companies must now inspire belief and trust in their communities; collaborate with their customers; create business models that are socially and environmentally responsible; find opportunities for creative collaboration with large, global markets; and become a new generation of innovators--"artists of business." With advice from "stay small but include all" to "profit with purpose" and "embrace disruption," Billee Howard gives readers the reinvented business toolkit that they will need to effectively collaborate, co-create, and succeed in a WE-Commerce landscape, and to acquire a new set of skills that will position them as leaders in the transformed economy.

Transformative Media

Transformative Media PDF Author: Sandra Jeppesen
Publisher: UBC Press
ISBN: 0774865946
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 313

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Book Description
In 1999, Seattle activists adopted cutting-edge livestream technology to cover protests against the World Trade Organization. The Indymedia network that emerged established the importance of alternative, anti-capitalist media for marginalized groups. Sandra Jeppesen traces subsequent global developments in activist media practices, investigating their role in contesting interlocking systems of capitalism, racism, colonialism, heteronormativity, and gender oppression by harnessing the transformative power of technologies for political purposes. Based on participatory research, Transformative Media offers new insights into the challenges and contradictions behind the scenes of some of the world’s most exciting and controversial social movements.