Designing Constructionist Futures

Designing Constructionist Futures PDF Author: Nathan Holbert
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262361094
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 433

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Book Description
A diverse group of scholars redefine constructionism--introduced by Seymour Papert in 1980--in light of new technologies and theories. Constructionism, first introduced by Seymour Papert in 1980, is a framework for learning to understand something by making an artifact for and with other people. A core goal of constructionists is to respect learners as creators, to enable them to engage in making meaning for themselves through construction, and to do this by democratizing access to the world's most creative and powerful tools. In this volume, an international and diverse group of scholars examine, reconstruct, and evolve the constructionist paradigm in light of new technologies and theories.

Designing Constructionist Futures

Designing Constructionist Futures PDF Author: Nathan Holbert
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262361094
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 433

Get Book Here

Book Description
A diverse group of scholars redefine constructionism--introduced by Seymour Papert in 1980--in light of new technologies and theories. Constructionism, first introduced by Seymour Papert in 1980, is a framework for learning to understand something by making an artifact for and with other people. A core goal of constructionists is to respect learners as creators, to enable them to engage in making meaning for themselves through construction, and to do this by democratizing access to the world's most creative and powerful tools. In this volume, an international and diverse group of scholars examine, reconstruct, and evolve the constructionist paradigm in light of new technologies and theories.

Futures Past

Futures Past PDF Author: Reinhart Koselleck
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231127715
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 340

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Book Description
Modernity in the late eighteenth century transformed all domains of European life -intellectual, industrial, and social. Not least affected was the experience of time itself: ever-accelerating change left people with briefer intervals of time in which to gather new experiences and adapt. In this provocative and erudite book Reinhart Koselleck, a distinguished philosopher of history, explores the concept of historical time by posing the question: what kind of experience is opened up by the emergence of modernity? Relying on an extraordinary array of witnesses and texts from politicians, philosophers, theologians, and poets to Renaissance paintings and the dreams of German citizens during the Third Reich, Koselleck shows that, with the advent of modernity, the past and the future became 'relocated' in relation to each other.The promises of modernity -freedom, progress, infinite human improvement -produced a world accelerating toward an unknown and unknowable future within which awaited the possibility of achieving utopian fulfillment. History, Koselleck asserts, emerged in this crucial moment as a new temporality providing distinctly new ways of assimilating experience. In the present context of globalization and its resulting crises, the modern world once again faces a crisis in aligning the experience of past and present. To realize that each present was once an imagined future may help us once again place ourselves within a temporality organized by human thought and humane ends as much as by the contingencies of uncontrolled events.

Futures Research and Environmental Sustainability

Futures Research and Environmental Sustainability PDF Author: James K. Lein
Publisher: CRC Press
ISBN: 1315353962
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 173

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Book Description
This book explores the challenges of presenting sustainability as a more actionable or practical concept and identifying approaches that might offer useful assistance in addressing the temporal and spatial representation of sustainability. The underlying premise of this book is that sustainability is a state realized in the future. In that future there is a geographic arrangement of society and economy that agrees with its environmental setting. This future perspective introduces a little examined subject area that can lend significant content to the sustainability challenge: Futures Research.

Future Theory

Future Theory PDF Author: Patricia Waugh
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1472567374
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 781

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Book Description
By interrogating the terms and concepts most central to cultural change, Future Theory interrogates how theory can play a central role in dynamic transition. It demonstrates how entangled the highly politicized spheres of cultural production, scientific invention, and intellectual discourse are in the contemporary world and how new concepts and forms of thinking are crucial to embarking upon change. Future Theory is built around five key concepts – change, boundaries, ruptures, assemblages, horizons – examined by leading international thinkers to build a vision of how theory can be applied to a constantly shifting world.

Imagined Futures

Imagined Futures PDF Author: Jens Beckert
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674545893
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 384

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Book Description
In a capitalist system, consumers, investors, and corporations orient their activities toward a future that contains opportunities and risks. How actors assess uncertainty is a problem that economists have tried to solve through general equilibrium and rational expectations theory. Powerful as these analytical tools are, they underestimate the future’s unknowability by assuming that markets, in the aggregate, correctly forecast what is to come. Jens Beckert adds a new chapter to the theory of capitalism by demonstrating how fictional expectations drive modern economies—or throw them into crisis when the imagined futures fail to materialize. Collectively held images of how the future will unfold are critical because they free economic actors from paralyzing doubt, enabling them to commit resources and coordinate decisions even if those expectations prove inaccurate. Beckert distinguishes fictional expectations from performativity theory, which holds that predictions tend to become self-fulfilling prophecies. Economic forecasts are important not because they produce the futures they envision but because they create the expectations that generate economic activity in the first place. Actors pursue money, investments, innovations, and consumption only if they believe the objects obtained through market exchanges will retain value. We accept money because we believe in its future purchasing power. We accept the risk of capital investments and innovation because we expect profit. And we purchase consumer goods based on dreams of satisfaction. As Imagined Futures shows, those who ignore the role of real uncertainty and fictional expectations in market dynamics misunderstand the nature of capitalism.

No Future

No Future PDF Author: Lee Edelman
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822385988
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 206

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Book Description
In this searing polemic, Lee Edelman outlines a radically uncompromising new ethics of queer theory. His main target is the all-pervasive figure of the child, which he reads as the linchpin of our universal politics of “reproductive futurism.” Edelman argues that the child, understood as innocence in need of protection, represents the possibility of the future against which the queer is positioned as the embodiment of a relentlessly narcissistic, antisocial, and future-negating drive. He boldly insists that the efficacy of queerness lies in its very willingness to embrace this refusal of the social and political order. In No Future, Edelman urges queers to abandon the stance of accommodation and accede to their status as figures for the force of a negativity that he links with irony, jouissance, and, ultimately, the death drive itself. Closely engaging with literary texts, Edelman makes a compelling case for imagining Scrooge without Tiny Tim and Silas Marner without little Eppie. Looking to Alfred Hitchcock’s films, he embraces two of the director’s most notorious creations: the sadistic Leonard of North by Northwest, who steps on the hand that holds the couple precariously above the abyss, and the terrifying title figures of The Birds, with their predilection for children. Edelman enlarges the reach of contemporary psychoanalytic theory as he brings it to bear not only on works of literature and film but also on such current political flashpoints as gay marriage and gay parenting. Throwing down the theoretical gauntlet, No Future reimagines queerness with a passion certain to spark an equally impassioned debate among its readers.

Metamodernism

Metamodernism PDF Author: Jason Ananda Josephson Storm
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022678665X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 375

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Book Description
Opening -- Part I. Metarealism. How the real world became a fable, or, The realities of social construction -- Part II. Process social ontology. Concepts in disintegration & strategies for demolition ; Process social ontology ; Social kinds -- Part III. Hylosemiotics. Hylosemiotics : the discourse of things -- Part IV. Knowledge and value. Zetetic knowledge ; The revaluation of values -- Conclusion : becoming metamodern.

Four Futures

Four Futures PDF Author: Peter Frase
Publisher: Verso Books
ISBN: 1781688141
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 134

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Book Description
An exploration of the utopias and dystopias that could develop from present society Peter Frase argues that increasing automation and a growing scarcity of resources, thanks to climate change, will bring it all tumbling down. In Four Futures, Frase imagines how this post-capitalist world might look, deploying the tools of both social science and speculative fiction to explore what communism, rentism and extermininsm might actually entail. Could the current rise of the real-life robocops usher in a world that resembles Ender's Game? And sure, communism will bring an end to material scarcities and inequalities of wealth—but there's no guarantee that social hierarchies, governed by an economy of "likes," wouldn't rise to take their place. A whirlwind tour through science fiction, social theory and the new technologies are already shaping our lives, Four Futures is a balance sheet of the socialisms we may reach if a resurgent Left is successful, and the barbarisms we may be consigned to if those movements fail.

Why Futures Studies?

Why Futures Studies? PDF Author: Eleonora Masini
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Forecasting
Languages : en
Pages : 168

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Book Description


Risky Futures

Risky Futures PDF Author: Olga Ulturgasheva
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 1800735944
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 234

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Book Description
The volume examines complex intersections of environmental conditions, geopolitical tensions and local innovative reactions characterising ‘the Arctic’ in the early twenty-first century. What happens in the region (such as permafrost thaw or methane release) not only sweeps rapidly through local ecosystems but also has profound global implications. Bringing together a unique combination of authors who are local practitioners, indigenous scholars and international researchers, the book provides nuanced views of the social consequences of climate change and environmental risks across human and non-human realms.