Sick Building Syndrome and the Problem of Uncertainty

Sick Building Syndrome and the Problem of Uncertainty PDF Author: Claudette Michelle Murphy
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 9780822336716
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 268

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Book Description
DIVAn account of sick building syndrome and the large number of historical conditions--office worker protests, feminism, ventilation engineering, toxicology, etc.--that coalesced to give this phenomenon real existence./div

Sick Building Syndrome and the Problem of Uncertainty

Sick Building Syndrome and the Problem of Uncertainty PDF Author: Claudette Michelle Murphy
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 9780822336716
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 268

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Book Description
DIVAn account of sick building syndrome and the large number of historical conditions--office worker protests, feminism, ventilation engineering, toxicology, etc.--that coalesced to give this phenomenon real existence./div

Seizing the Means of Reproduction

Seizing the Means of Reproduction PDF Author: Claudette Michelle Murphy
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822353369
Category : Health & Fitness
Languages : en
Pages : 269

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Book Description
In Seizing the Means of Reproduction, Michelle Murphy's initial focus on the alternative health practices developed by radical feminists in the United States during the 1970s and 1980s opens into a sophisticated analysis of the transnational entanglements of American empire, population control, neoliberalism, and late-twentieth-century feminisms. Murphy concentrates on the technoscientific means—the technologies, practices, protocols, and processes—developed by feminist health activists. She argues that by politicizing the technical details of reproductive health, alternative feminist practices aimed at empowering women were also integral to late-twentieth-century biopolitics. Murphy traces the transnational circulation of cheap, do-it-yourself health interventions, highlighting the uneasy links between economic logics, new forms of racialized governance, U.S. imperialism, family planning, and the rise of NGOs. In the twenty-first century, feminist health projects have followed complex and discomforting itineraries. The practices and ideologies of alternative health projects have found their way into World Bank guidelines, state policies, and commodified research. While the particular moment of U.S. feminism in the shadow of Cold War and postcolonialism has passed, its dynamics continue to inform the ways that health is governed and politicized today.

Sick Building Syndrome

Sick Building Syndrome PDF Author: Sabah A. Abdul-Wahab
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 3642179193
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 634

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Book Description
This volume throws light on the Sick Building Syndrome in Libraries and other public buildings, and the extent to which it is influenced by the internal environment of libraries. One of the signs of this disease is that the person suffers from a set of symptoms closely related to his/her presence in the building, without the identification of any clear causes, and his/her relief of these symptoms when he/she are out of the building. Hence, the book sheds on the extent to which the interior environment impacts upon the health of the people, and the extent to which this is reflected in their performance. The book can be used for teaching, research, and professional reference. It concludes with the recommendation that is essential to observe environmental dimensions when designing library and public buildings, taking into consideration the expected impact of SBS in library and public buildings on people. The significance of the book derives from the fact that it is the first of its kind to examine the issue of the interior environment and SBS of library and public building worldwide.

The Economization of Life

The Economization of Life PDF Author: M. Murphy
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822373211
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 201

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Book Description
What is a life worth? In the wake of eugenics, new quantitative racist practices that valued life for the sake of economic futures flourished. In The Economization of Life, M. Murphy provocatively describes the twentieth-century rise of infrastructures of calculation and experiment aimed at governing population for the sake of national economy, pinpointing the spread of a potent biopolitical logic: some must not be born so that others might live more prosperously. Resituating the history of postcolonial neoliberal technique in expert circuits between the United States and Bangladesh, Murphy traces the methods and imaginaries through which family planning calculated lives not worth living, lives not worth saving, and lives not worth being born. The resulting archive of thick data transmuted into financialized “Invest in a Girl” campaigns that reframed survival as a question of human capital. The book challenges readers to reject the economy as our collective container and to refuse population as a term of reproductive justice.

Office Buildings

Office Buildings PDF Author: Pranab Kumar Nag
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 9811325774
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 536

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Book Description
This book brings together concepts from the building, environmental, behavioural and health sciences to provide an interdisciplinary understanding of office and workplace design. Today, with changes in the world of work and the relentless surge in technology, offices have emerged as the repositories of organizational symbolism, denoted by the spatial design of offices, physical settings and the built environment (architecture, urban locale). Drawing on Euclidian geometry that quantifies space as the distance between two or more points, a body of knowledge on office buildings, the concept of office and office space, and the interrelationships of spatial and behavioural attributes in office design are elucidated. Building and office work-related illnesses, namely sick building syndrome and ailments arising from the indoor environment, and the menace of musculoskeletal disorders are the alarming manifestations that critically affect employee satisfaction, morale and work outcomes. With a focus on office ergonomics, the book brings the discussion on the fundamentals of work design, with emphasis on computer workstation users. Strategic guidance of lighting systems and visual performance in workplaces are directed for better application of ergonomics and improvement in office indoor environment. It discusses the profiles of bioclimatic, indoor air quality, ventilation intervention, lighting and acoustic characteristics in office buildings. Emphasis has been given to the energy performance of buildings, and contemporary perspectives of building sustainability, such as green office building assessment schemes, and national and international building-related standards and codes. Intended for students and professionals from ergonomics, architecture, interior design, as well as construction engineers, health care professionals, and office planners, the book brings a unified overview of the health, safety and environment issues associated with the design of office buildings.

Hazards of the Job

Hazards of the Job PDF Author: Christopher C. Sellers
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN: 0807864455
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 350

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Book Description
Hazards of the Job explores the roots of modern environmentalism in the early-twentieth-century United States. It was in the workplace of this era, argues Christopher Sellers, that our contemporary understanding of environmental health dangers first took shape. At the crossroads where medicine and science met business, labor, and the state, industrial hygiene became a crucible for molding midcentury notions of corporate interest and professional disinterest as well as environmental concepts of the 'normal' and the 'natural.' The evolution of industrial hygiene illuminates how powerfully battles over knowledge and objectivity could reverberate in American society: new ways of establishing cause and effect begat new predicaments in medicine, law, economics, politics, and ethics, even as they enhanced the potential for environmental control. From the 1910s through the 1930s, as Sellers shows, industrial hygiene investigators fashioned a professional culture that gained the confidence of corporations, unions, and a broader public. As the hygienists moved beyond the workplace, this microenvironment prefigured their understanding of the environment at large. Transforming themselves into linchpins of science-based production and modern consumerism, they also laid the groundwork for many controversies to come.

Surfing Uncertainty

Surfing Uncertainty PDF Author: Andy Clark
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0190217014
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 425

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Book Description
Exciting new theories in neuroscience, psychology, and artificial intelligence are revealing minds like ours as predictive minds, forever trying to guess the incoming streams of sensory stimulation before they arrive. In this up-to-the-minute treatment, philosopher and cognitive scientist Andy Clark explores new ways of thinking about perception, action, and the embodied mind.

Natural Visions

Natural Visions PDF Author: Finis Dunaway
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022645424X
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 280

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Book Description
Walden Pond. The Grand Canyon.Yosemite National Park. Throughout the twentieth century, photographers and filmmakers created unforgettable images of these and other American natural treasures. Many of these images, including the work of Ansel Adams, continue to occupy a prominent place in the American imagination. Making these representations, though, was more than a purely aesthetic project. In fact, portraying majestic scenes and threatened places galvanized concern for the environment and its protection. Natural Visions documents through images the history of environmental reform from the Progressive era to the first Earth Day celebration in 1970, showing the crucial role the camera played in the development of the conservation movement. In Natural Visions, Finis Dunaway tells the story of how visual imagery—such as wilderness photographs, New Deal documentary films, and Sierra Club coffee-table books—shaped modern perceptions of the natural world. By examining the relationship between the camera and environmental politics through detailed studies of key artists and activists, Dunaway captures the emotional and spiritual meaning that became associated with the American landscape. Throughout the book, he reveals how photographers and filmmakers adapted longstanding traditions in American culture—the Puritan jeremiad, the romantic sublime, and the frontier myth—to literally picture nature as a place of grace for the individual and the nation. Beautifully illustrated with photographs by Ansel Adams, Eliot Porter, and a host of other artists, Natural Visions will appeal to a wide range of readers interested in American cultural history, the visual arts, and environmentalism.

Justification and Critique

Justification and Critique PDF Author: Rainer Forst
Publisher: Polity
ISBN: 074565228X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 228

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Book Description
Rainer Forst develops a critical theory capable of deciphering the deficits and potentials inherent in contemporary political reality. This calls for a perspective which is immanent to social and political practices and at the same time transcends them. Forst regards society as a whole as an ‘order of justification’ comprising complexes of different norms referring to institutions and corresponding practices of justification. The task of a ‘critique of relations of justification’, therefore, is to analyse such legitimations with regard to their validity and genesis and to explore the social and political asymmetries leading to inequalities in the ‘justification power’ which enables persons or groups to contest given justifications and to create new ones. Starting from the concept of justification as a basic social practice, Forst develops a theory of political and social justice, human rights and democracy, as well as of power and of critique itself. In so doing, he engages in a critique of a number of contemporary approaches in political philosophy and critical theory. Finally, he also addresses the question of the utopian horizon of social criticism.

What's Wrong with Climate Politics and How to Fix It

What's Wrong with Climate Politics and How to Fix It PDF Author: Paul G. Harris
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 0745670431
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 306

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Book Description
Governments have failed to stem global emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases causing climate change. Indeed, climate-changing pollution is increasing globally, and will do so for decades to come without far more aggressive action. What explains this failure to effectively tackle one of the world's most serious problems? And what can we do about it? To answer these questions, Paul G. Harris looks at climate politics as a doctor might look at a very sick patient. He performs urgent diagnoses and prescribes vital treatments to revive our ailing planet before it's too late. The book begins by diagnosing what’s most wrong with climate politics, including the anachronistic international system, which encourages nations to fight for their narrowly perceived interests and makes major cuts in greenhouse pollution extraordinarily difficult; the deadlock between the United States and China, which together produce over one-third of global greenhouse gas pollution but do little more than demand that the other act first; and affluent lifestyles and overconsumption, which are spreading rapidly from industrialized nations to the developing world. The book then prescribes several "remedies" for the failed politics of climate change, including a new kind of climate diplomacy with people at its center, national policies that put the common but differentiated responsibilities of individuals alongside those of nations, and a campaign for simultaneously enhancing human wellbeing and environmental sustainability. While these treatments are aspirational, they are not intended to be utopian. As Harris shows, they are genuine, workable solutions to what ails the politics of climate change today.