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Author: Robert Crocker
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317281136
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 246
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Book Description
There is now a widespread interest in reuse in many domains, from opera houses built over old warehouses, to vintage clothes and everyday goods incorporating repurposed materials or parts. Despite its ubiquity, this extensive creative work is typically seen in narrowly environmental terms, as a means of reducing carbon, resource use or waste. However, as this volume shows, reuse also has aesthetic and cultural dimensions and a rich social currency, invoked to consciously subvert the accelerated consumer culture responsible for our unfolding environmental crisis. In three parts, the essays in this book consider reuse in terms of values, aesthetics and meaning, its application in contemporary urban and spatial settings, and the revival of social practices involving a more conscious recourse to reuse and repair. These are bookended by the editors' essays: the first, on the significant relationship between reuse and technological and social acceleration evident in the surrounding consumer society; and the last, on the multiple forms of reuse deployed in a contemporary alternative building practice, and their contributions to presenting alternative ways of living in the world. Challenging dominant understandings of ‘waste’ and ‘consumption’, Subverting Consumerism shows how reuse has become a means for many to creatively engage with the past, and to discover a continuity and sense of place eroded by the accelerative regimes of contemporary consumerism. Becoming a means of resistance, and offering a range of aesthetic, social and economic possibilities, reuse can be found to subvert and challenge the obsessive quest for the new found in contemporary consumerism.
Author: Robert Crocker
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317281136
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 246
Get Book Here
Book Description
There is now a widespread interest in reuse in many domains, from opera houses built over old warehouses, to vintage clothes and everyday goods incorporating repurposed materials or parts. Despite its ubiquity, this extensive creative work is typically seen in narrowly environmental terms, as a means of reducing carbon, resource use or waste. However, as this volume shows, reuse also has aesthetic and cultural dimensions and a rich social currency, invoked to consciously subvert the accelerated consumer culture responsible for our unfolding environmental crisis. In three parts, the essays in this book consider reuse in terms of values, aesthetics and meaning, its application in contemporary urban and spatial settings, and the revival of social practices involving a more conscious recourse to reuse and repair. These are bookended by the editors' essays: the first, on the significant relationship between reuse and technological and social acceleration evident in the surrounding consumer society; and the last, on the multiple forms of reuse deployed in a contemporary alternative building practice, and their contributions to presenting alternative ways of living in the world. Challenging dominant understandings of ‘waste’ and ‘consumption’, Subverting Consumerism shows how reuse has become a means for many to creatively engage with the past, and to discover a continuity and sense of place eroded by the accelerative regimes of contemporary consumerism. Becoming a means of resistance, and offering a range of aesthetic, social and economic possibilities, reuse can be found to subvert and challenge the obsessive quest for the new found in contemporary consumerism.
Author: Yiannis Gabriel
Publisher: SAGE
ISBN: 1473933765
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 336
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Book Description
‘The Unmanageable Consumer has long been one of my favorite books in the sociology of consumption. This long overdue third edition has updated and revised the basic argument in many ways. Most importantly, it now offers a new chapter on the consumer as worker or, more generally, the prosumer. Assign it to your classes (I have...and will again) and read it for your edification.’ - George Ritzer, Distinguished University Professor, University of Maryland, USA Western-style consumerism is often presented as unstoppable, yet its costs mount and its grip on consumer reality weakens. In this 20th Anniversary edition, Gabriel and Lang restate their thesis that consumerism is more fragile and unmanageable than is assumed by its proponents. Consumerism has been both stretched and undermined by globalization, the internet, social media and other cultural changes. Major environmental threats, debt, squeezed incomes and social inequalities now temper Western consumers′ appetite for spending. The 20th century Deal, first championed by Henry Ford, of more consumption from higher waged work looks tattered. This edition of The Unmanageable Consumer continues to explore 10 different consumer models, and encourages analysis of contemporary consumerism. It looks at the spread of consumerism to developing countries like India and China and considers the effects of demographic changes and migration, and points to new features such as consumers taking on unwaged work. New to this edition: Coverage of new phenomenon such as social media and emerging markets Explores contemporary topics including the occupy movement and horsemeat scandal A new chapter on the consumer as worker. ′This is a remarkable and important book. The new edition updates consumer cultural studies to take into account austerity politics and the economic crisis, and the impact these have had on how we think about and experience everyday practices of shopping and consuming. The authors also build on and maintain the lively and challenging argument from the previous volumes which sees the consumer as an unstable space for a multiplicity of often contradictory responses which can unsettle the various strategies on the part of contemporary capitalism to have us buy more.′ - Angela McRobbie, Goldsmiths, University of London ‘The book exemplifies how social science should be: engaged, insightful, imaginative, scholarly and highly socially and politically relevant. Strongly recommended to students, academics as well as all people interested in understanding our time and themselves in an age of consumerism and false promises.’ - Mats Alvesson, Professor of Business Administration, Lund University, Sweden
Author: Andrew W. Rate
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030873161
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 451
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Book Description
This textbook addresses the increasing trend in urbanization of the world’s population and its relation with urban soils. Written by active practitioners of university level teaching and research, this book is designed primarily as an educational text, while it also provides readers with an authoritative gateway to the primary literature. It includes explicit coverage of spatial and statistical (multivariate) techniques and case studies to illustrate key concept, and to support practical guidance in issues such as data collection and analysis. The authors reflect current developments in research and urban trends. In China, for example, the proportion of the population living in cities increased from 13% in 1950 to 45% in 2010 (World Bank data). Australia is one of the world's top ten urbanised countries with population greater than ten million, with approximately 90% of its population living in cities, mainly along Australia's coast. The most rapidly urbanising populations are currently in nations of the African continent. Soils in urban areas have multiple functions which are becoming more valued by urban communities: soils supply water, nutrients and physical support for urban plant and animal communities (parks, reserves, gardens), and are becoming increasingly valued for growing food. Soils may be used for building foundations, or as building materials themselves. Urban hydrology relies on the existence of unsealed soils for aquifer protection and flood control. This volume presents the importance of urban ecosystems and the impacts of global change. It examines pedogenesis of urban soils: natural materials affected by urban phenomena, and natural processes acting on urban materials, including an examination of different climatic zones. There is a focus on soils formed on landfill, reclaimed land, dredge spoils as well as soil-related changes in urban geomorphology. There is plenty of discussion on urban soil as a source and sink as well as soil geochemistry and health. The book is intended primarily as a text for upper-level undergraduate, and postgraduate (Masters) students. It will also be invaluable as a resource for professionals such as researchers, environmental regulators, and environmental consultants.
Author: Craig Vear
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000522040
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 978
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Book Description
The Routledge International Handbook of Practice-Based Research presents a cohesive framework with which to conduct practice-based research or to support, manage and supervise practice-based researchers. It has been written with an inclusive approach, with the intention of presenting deep and meaningful knowledge for the benefit of all readers. This handbook has been designed to present specific detail of practice-based research by outlining its shared traits with all forms of research and to highlight its core distinguishing features into a cohesive, principled and methodical approach. To this end, the handbook is presented in five sections: 1. Practice-Based Research, 2. Knowledge, 3. Method, 4. The Practice-Based PhD and 5. Practitioner Voices. Each section begins with a leading chapter that outlines each of the distinct areas as they relate to practice-based research. This is followed by a series of contributing chapters that discuss pertinent themes in more detail. Practitioners from a broad range of backgrounds will find these chapters helpful: research students or final year graduates will be introduced to the principled nature of practice-based research PhD researchers embarking on a research project or are in the flow of research will find this guidance supportive professionals such as designers, makers, engineers, artists and creative technologists wishing to strengthen their research into their practice will be guided through the principled and focused nature of practice-based research supervisors, managers and policy makers will benefit from the potential and rigour of practice-based researchers in the pursuit of new knowledge.
Author: Kat Jungnickel
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262356635
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 265
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Book Description
Researchers rethink tactics for inventing and disseminating research, examining the use of such unconventional forms as poetry, performance, catalogs, interactive machines, costume, and digital platforms. Transmission is the research moment when invention meets dissemination—the tactical combination of making (how theory, methods, and data shape research) and communicating (how research is shown and shared). In this book, researchers from a range of disciplines examine tactics for the transmission of research, exploring such unconventional forms as poetry, performance, catalogs, interactive machines, costume, and digital platforms. Focusing on transmissions draws attention to a critical part of the research process commonly overlooked and undervalued. Too often, the results of radically experimental research methodologies are pressed into conventional formats. The contributors to Transmissions rethink tactics for making and communicating research as integral to the kind of projects they do, pushing against disciplinary edges with unexpected and creative combinations and collaborations. Each chapter focuses on a different tactic of transmission. One contributor merges literary styles of the empirical and poetic; another uses an angle grinder to construct machines of enquiry. One project invites readers to participate in an exchange about value; another provides a series of catalog cards to materialize ordering systems of knowledge. All the contributors share a commitment to uniting the what with the how, firmly situating their transmissions in their research and in each unique chapter of this book. Contributors Nerea Calvillo, Rebecca Coleman, Larissa Hjorth, Janis Jefferies, Kat Jungnickel, Sarah Kember, Max Liboiron, Kristina Lindström, Alexandra Lippman, Bonnie Mak, Julien McHardy, Julia Pollack, Ingrid Richardson, Åsa Ståhl, Laura Watts
Author: Peter C. Little
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190934549
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 249
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Book Description
Introduction: From e-waste ashes to ethnographic intervention -- Amidst global e-waste trades and green neoliberalization -- "We are all North here" : Dagomba migrations and meanings -- Erasure, demolition, and violent obsolescence in the urban margins -- Embodied burning, e-waste epidemiology, and toxic postcolonial corporality -- Visualizing Agbogbloshie and re-envisioning e-waste anthropology -- Looming uncertainties and neoliberal techno-optimism -- Conclusion: New openings, relations, and burning matters.
Author: Hideki Endo
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429759908
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 352
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Book Description
The total number of foreign tourists received in countries throughout the world was 530 million in 1995. That number broke through the 1 billion mark for the first time in 2012, at 1,035,000,000. In 2015, it reached 1,180,000,000. According to Anthony Elliott and John Urry, modern society has been characterized as being "mobile", and within that we are also living "mobile lives". In modern society, flows of people, things, capital, information, ideas and technologies are constantly occurring, and as they are merging like a violently rushing stream, what could be termed a landscape of mobilities has appeared. Social realities are in flux and are transforming to become different than they were before. This volume will expand the inquiry of tourism mobilities comprehensively and clearly from the fields of humanities and social sciences. In particular, tourism mobilities has been actively investigated up to now in the UK, US, Europe and Australia, but even though the Japanese body of literature contains a great many excellent studies of Japanese examples, there are almost no English-language articles presenting their results. Publishing examples of Japanese tourism mobilities will not only foster new and exciting lines of inquiry for existing and future research on tourism mobilities, but will also have implications for humanities and social sciences throughout the world.
Author: Massimo Durante
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000345343
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 272
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Book Description
We delegate more and more decisions and tasks to artificial agents, machine-learning mechanisms, and algorithmic procedures or, in other words, to computational systems. Not that we are driven by powerful ambitions of colonizing the Moon, replacing humans with legions of androids, creating sci-fi scenarios à la Matrix or masterminding some sort of Person of Interest-like Machine. No, the current digital revolution based on computational power is chiefly an everyday revolution. It is therefore that much more profound, unnoticed and widespread, for it affects our customary habits and routines and alters the very texture of our day-to-day lives. This opens a precise line of inquiry, which constitutes the basic thesis of the present text: our computational power is exercised by trying to adapt not just the world but also our representation of reality to how computationally based ICTs work. The impact of this technology is such that it does not leave things as they are: it changes the nature of agents, habits, objects and institutions and hence it subverts the existing order, without necessarily generating a new one. I argue that this power is often not distributed in an egalitarian manner but, on the contrary, is likely to result in concentrations of wealth, in dominant positions or in unjust competitive advantages. This opens up a struggle, with respect to which the task of reaffirming the fundamental values, the guiding principles, the priorities and the rules of the game, which can transform, or attempt to transform, a fierce confrontation between enemies in a fair competition between opponents rests on us.
Author: Anthony M. Clohesy
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134248121
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 169
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Book Description
This exciting new textbook presents a clear framework for students to understand how themes and issues in political thought have emerged and developed throughout the 20th Century. Charting the progression from the preoccupation with the boundaries of the modern state, through to the current debates on rights, identity and justice; the three sections of the book enable the ideas of significant political thinkers to unfold through a telling of the key political events that gave a social context for their thought: Section I: The Inter-War Debate: Weber, Gramsci and Schmitt Section II: Post-War Debates: Arendt, Oakeshott, De Beauvoir and Adorno Section III: Contemporary Debates: Rawls, Nozick, Kymlicka and Foucault Written in an accessible and concise format, features include: 'rewind' and 'fast-forward' indicators to easily guide students around the text discussion points, revision notes and further reading in each chapter informative text boxes to highlight key concepts, people and events. By exploring an often ignored relationship in political thought, the influence of thought upon historical change and the influence of historical change upon theory, this text delivers new and exciting angles from which to approach politics today. Contemporary Political Theorists in Context is essential reading for all students of social and political theory.
Author: Kimberley Kinder
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 1452963363
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 320
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Book Description
Examines how radical bookstores and similar spaces serve as launching pads for social movements How does social change happen? It requires an identified problem, an impassioned and committed group, a catalyst, and a plan. In this deeply researched consideration of seventy-seven stores and establishments, Kimberley Kinder argues that activists also need autonomous space for organizing, and that these spaces are made, not found. She explores the remarkably enduring presence of radical bookstores in America and how they provide infrastructure for organizing—gathering places, retail offerings that draw new people into what she calls “counterspaces.” Kinder focuses on brick-and-mortar venues where owners approach their businesses primarily as social movement tools. These may be bookstores, infoshops, libraries, knowledge cafes, community centers, publishing collectives, thrift stores, or art installations. They are run by activist-entrepreneurs who create centers for organizing and selling books to pay the rent. These spaces allow radical and contentious ideas to be explored and percolate through to actual social movements, and serve as crucibles for activists to challenge capitalism, imperialism, white privilege, patriarchy, and homophobia. They also exist within a central paradox: participating in the marketplace creates tensions, contradictions, and shortfalls. Activist retail does not end capitalism; collective ownership does not enable a retreat from civic requirements like zoning; and donations, no matter how generous, do not offset the enormous power of corporations and governments. In this timely and relevant book, Kinder presents a necessary, novel, and apt analysis of the role these retail spaces play in radical organizing, one that demonstrates how such durable hubs manage to persist, often for decades, between the spikes of public protest.
