Author: Precarity Lab
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 1912685728
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 127
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Book Description
An analysis that traces the role of digital technology in multiplying precarity. Technoprecarious advances a new analytic for tracing how precarity unfolds across disparate geographical sites and cultural practices in the digital age. Digital technologies--whether apps like Uber built on flexible labor or platforms like Airbnb that shift accountability to users--have assisted in consolidating the wealth and influence of a small number of players. These platforms have also furthered increasingly insecure conditions of work and life for racial, ethnic, and sexual minorities, women, indigenous people, migrants, and peoples in the global south. At the same time, precarity has become increasingly generalized, expanding to include even the creative class and digital producers themselves.
Author: Elizabeth Kryder-Reid
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000918017
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 324
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Book Description
Toxic Heritage addresses the heritage value of contamination and toxic sites and provides the first in-depth examination of toxic heritage as a global issue. Bringing together case studies, visual essays, and substantive chapters written by leading scholars from around the world, the volume provides a critical framing of the globally expanding field of toxic heritage. Authors from a variety of disciplinary perspectives and methodologies examine toxic heritage as both a material phenomenon and a concept. Organized into five thematic sections, the book explores the meaning and significance of toxic heritage, politics, narratives, affected communities, and activist approaches and interventions. It identifies critical issues and highlights areas of emerging research on the intersections of environmental harm with formal and informal memory practices, while also highlighting the resilience, advocacy, and creativity of communities, scholars, and heritage professionals in responding to the current environmental crises. Toxic Heritage is useful and relevant to scholars and students working across a range of disciplines, including heritage studies, environmental science, archaeology, anthropology, and geography.
Author: Peter C. Little
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1666901105
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 259
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Book Description
This book explores technology and the global tech industry in relation to social, health, economic, and environmental relations and politics. Peter C. Little argues that the power and influence of electronics and Big Tech—from the proliferation of digital platforms to the expansion of global electronic waste streams—is a political-ecological problem that impacts communities and lives in both the Global North and South. From intense resource extraction, industrial pollution, and surging health and economic inequalities, to data-driven surveillance, platform economy proliferation and intrusion, and Silicon Valley corporate-power, Little argues that the political ecology of tech matters now more than ever. Based on a mixture of engagements with tech criticism, ethnographic case studies, and critical analysis and development of guiding concepts—ranging from technocapital to technoprecarious political ecology—the book exposes and interrogates the underlying toxicity, precarity, and planetary politics of global tech. Critical Zones of Technopower and Global Political Ecology also tracks justice struggles that confront technopower, including “just tech” forms of social action that further reinforce the importance of a global political ecology of technocapitalism in the digital age.
Author: Laura Denardis
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262539756
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 325
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Book Description
Scholars from a range of disciplines discuss research methods, theories, and conceptual approaches in the study of internet governance. The design and governance of the internet has become one of the most pressing geopolitical issues of our era. The stability of the economy, democracy, and the public sphere are wholly dependent on the stability and security of the internet. Revelations about election hacking, facial recognition technology, and government surveillance have gotten the public's attention and made clear the need for scholarly research that examines internet governance both empirically and conceptually. In this volume, scholars from a range of disciplines consider research methods, theories, and conceptual approaches in the study of internet governance.
Author: Janaki Srinivasan
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262370379
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 277
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Book Description
How the definition, production, and leveraging of information are shaped by caste, class, and gender, and the implications for development. Information, says Janaki Srinivasan, has fundamentally reshaped development discourse and practice. In this study, she examines the history of the idea of “information” and its political implications for poverty alleviation. She presents three cases in India—the circulation of price information in a fish market in Kerala, government information in information kiosks operated by a nonprofit in Puducherry, and a political campaign demanding a right to information in Rajasthan—to explore three uses of information to support goals of social change. Countering claims that information is naturally and universally empowering, Srinivasan shows how the definition, production, and leveraging of information are shaped by caste, class, and gender. Srinivasan draws on archival and ethnographic research to challenge the idea of information as objective and factual. Using the concept of an “information order,” she examines how the meaning and value of information reflect the social relations in which it is embedded. She asks why casting information as a tool of development and solution to poverty appeals to actors across the political spectrum. She also shows how the power to label some things information and others not is at least as significant as the capacity to subsequently produce, access, and leverage information. The more faith we place in what information can do, she cautions, the less attention we pay to its political lives and to the role of specific social structures, individual agency, and material form in the defining, production, and use of that information.
Author: Silvia M. Lindtner
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691179484
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 302
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Book Description
A vivid look at China’s shifting place in the global political economy of technology production How did China’s mass manufacturing and “copycat” production become transformed, in the global tech imagination, from something holding the nation back to one of its key assets? Prototype Nation offers a rich transnational analysis of how the promise of democratized innovation and entrepreneurial life has shaped China’s governance and global image. With historical precision and ethnographic detail, Silvia Lindtner reveals how a growing distrust in Western models of progress and development, including Silicon Valley and the tech industry after the financial crisis of 2007–8, shaped the rise of the global maker movement and the vision of China as a “new frontier” of innovation. Lindtner’s investigations draw on more than a decade of research in experimental work spaces—makerspaces, coworking spaces, innovation hubs, hackathons, and startup weekends—in China, the United States, Africa, Europe, Taiwan, and Singapore, as well as in key sites of technology investment and industrial production—tech incubators, corporate offices, and factories. She examines how the ideals of the maker movement, to intervene in social and economic structures, served the technopolitical project of prototyping a “new” optimistic, assertive, and global China. In doing so, Lindtner demonstrates that entrepreneurial living influences governance, education, policy, investment, and urban redesign in ways that normalize the persistence of sexism, racism, colonialism, and labor exploitation. Prototype Nation shows that by attending to the bodies and sites that nurture entrepreneurial life, technology can be extricated from the seemingly endless cycle of promise and violence. Cover image: Courtesy of Cao Fei, Vitamin Creative Space and Sprüth Magers
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.
Author: Abbie E. Goldberg
Publisher: SAGE Publications
ISBN: 1544393849
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 1972
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Book Description
Transgender studies, broadly defined, has become increasingly prominent as a field of study over the past several decades, particularly in the last ten years. The experiences and rights of trans people have also increasingly become the subject of news coverage, such as the ability of trans people to access restrooms, their participation in the military, the issuing of driver’s licenses that allow a third gender option, the growing visibility of nonbinary trans teens, the denial of gender-affirming health care to trans youth, and the media’s misgendering of trans actors. With more and more trans people being open about their gender identities, doctors, nurses, psychologists, social workers, counselors, educators, higher education administrators, student affairs personnel, and others are increasingly working with trans individuals who are out. But many professionals have little formal training or awareness of the life experiences and needs of the trans population. This can seriously interfere with open communications between trans people and service providers and can negatively impact trans people’s health outcomes and well-being, as well as interfere with their educational and career success and advancement. Having an authoritative, academic resource like The SAGE Encyclopedia of Trans Studies can go a long way toward correcting misconceptions and providing information that is otherwise not readily available. This encyclopedia, featuring more than 300 well-researched articles, takes an interdisciplinary and intersectional approach to trans studies. Entries address a wide range of topics, from broad concepts (e.g., the criminal justice system, activism, mental health), to specific subjects (e.g., the trans pride flag, the Informed Consent Model, voice therapy), to key historical figures, events, and organizations (e.g., Lili Elbe, the Stonewall Riots, Black Lives Matter). Entries focus on diverse lives, identities, and contexts, including the experiences of trans people in different racial, religious, and sexual communities in the United States and the variety of ways that gender is expressed in other countries. Among the fields of studies covered are psychology, sociology, history, family studies, K-12 and higher education, law/political science, medicine, economics, literature, popular culture, the media, and sports.
Author: Anna Watkins Fisher
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 1452967245
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 109
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Book Description
How fluorescent orange symbolizes the uneven distribution of safety and risk in the neoliberal United States Safety Orange first emerged in the 1950s as a bureaucratic color standard in technical manuals and federal regulations in the United States. Today it is most visible in the contexts of terror, pandemic, and environmental alarm systems; traffic control; work safety; and mass incarceration. In recent decades, the color has become ubiquitous in American public life—a marker of the extreme poles of state oversight and abandonment, of capitalist excess and dereliction. Its unprecedented saturation encodes the tracking of those bodies, neighborhoods, and infrastructures judged as worthy of care—and those deemed dangerous and expendable. Here, Anna Watkins Fisher uses Safety Orange as an interpretive key for theorizing the uneven distribution of safety and care in twenty-first-century U.S. public life and for pondering what the color tells us about neoliberalism’s intensifying impact often hiding in plain sight in ordinary and commonplace phenomena. Forerunners: Ideas First is a thought-in-process series of breakthrough digital publications. Written between fresh ideas and finished books, Forerunners draws on scholarly work initiated in notable blogs, social media, conference plenaries, journal articles, and the synergy of academic exchange. This is gray literature publishing: where intense thinking, change, and speculation take place in scholarship.
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.
