An Uncertain Future - Anticipating Oil in Uganda

An Uncertain Future - Anticipating Oil in Uganda PDF Author: Annika Witte
Publisher: Göttingen University Press
ISBN: 3863953606
Category : Petroleum
Languages : en
Pages : 278

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Book Description
The discovery of oil in Uganda in 2006 ushered in an oil-age era with new prospects of unforeseen riches. However, after an initial exploration boom developments stalled. Unlike other countries with major oil discoveries, Uganda has been slow in developing its oil. In fact, over ten years after the first discoveries, there is still no oil. During the time of the research for this book between 2012 and 2015, Uganda’s oil had not yet fully materialised but was becoming. The overarching characteristic of this research project was waiting for the big changes to come: a waiting characterised by indeterminacy. There is a timeline but every year it gets expanded and in 2018 having oil still seems to belong to an uncertain future. This book looks at the waiting period as a time of not-yet-ness and describes the practices of future- and resource-making in Uganda. How did Ugandans handle the new resource wealth and how did they imagine their future with oil to be? This ethnography is concerned with Uganda’s oil and the way Ugandans anticipated different futures with it: promising futures of wealth and development and disturbing futures of destruction and suffering. The book works out how uncertainty was an underlying feature of these anticipations and how risks and risk discourses shaped the imaginations of possible futures. Much of the talk around the oil involved the dichotomy of blessing or curse and it was not clear, which one the oil would be. Rather than adding another assessment of what the future with oil will be like, this book describes the predictions and prophesies as an essential part of how resources are being made. This ethnography shows how various actors in Uganda, from the state, the oil industry, the civil society, and the extractive communities, have tried to negotiate their position in the oil arena. Annika Witte argues in this book that by establishing their risks and using them as power resources actors can influence the becoming of oil as a resource and their own place in a petro-future. The book offers one of the first ethnographic accounts of Uganda’s oil and the negotiations that took place in an oil state to be.

An Uncertain Future - Anticipating Oil in Uganda

An Uncertain Future - Anticipating Oil in Uganda PDF Author: Annika Witte
Publisher: Göttingen University Press
ISBN: 3863953606
Category : Petroleum
Languages : en
Pages : 278

Get Book Here

Book Description
The discovery of oil in Uganda in 2006 ushered in an oil-age era with new prospects of unforeseen riches. However, after an initial exploration boom developments stalled. Unlike other countries with major oil discoveries, Uganda has been slow in developing its oil. In fact, over ten years after the first discoveries, there is still no oil. During the time of the research for this book between 2012 and 2015, Uganda’s oil had not yet fully materialised but was becoming. The overarching characteristic of this research project was waiting for the big changes to come: a waiting characterised by indeterminacy. There is a timeline but every year it gets expanded and in 2018 having oil still seems to belong to an uncertain future. This book looks at the waiting period as a time of not-yet-ness and describes the practices of future- and resource-making in Uganda. How did Ugandans handle the new resource wealth and how did they imagine their future with oil to be? This ethnography is concerned with Uganda’s oil and the way Ugandans anticipated different futures with it: promising futures of wealth and development and disturbing futures of destruction and suffering. The book works out how uncertainty was an underlying feature of these anticipations and how risks and risk discourses shaped the imaginations of possible futures. Much of the talk around the oil involved the dichotomy of blessing or curse and it was not clear, which one the oil would be. Rather than adding another assessment of what the future with oil will be like, this book describes the predictions and prophesies as an essential part of how resources are being made. This ethnography shows how various actors in Uganda, from the state, the oil industry, the civil society, and the extractive communities, have tried to negotiate their position in the oil arena. Annika Witte argues in this book that by establishing their risks and using them as power resources actors can influence the becoming of oil as a resource and their own place in a petro-future. The book offers one of the first ethnographic accounts of Uganda’s oil and the negotiations that took place in an oil state to be.

Uncertain Futures

Uncertain Futures PDF Author: Jens Beckert
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192552759
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 421

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Book Description
Uncertain Futures considers how economic actors visualize the future and decide how to act in conditions of radical uncertainty. It starts from the premise that dynamic capitalist economies are characterized by relentless innovation and novelty and hence exhibit an indeterminacy that cannot be reduced to measurable risk. The organizing question then becomes how economic actors form expectations and make decisions despite the uncertainty they face. This edited volume lays the foundations for a new model of economic reasoning by showing how, in conditions of uncertainty, economic actors combine calculation with imaginaries and narratives to form fictional expectations that coordinate action and provide the confidence to act. It draws on groundbreaking research in economic sociology, economics, anthropology, and psychology to present theoretically grounded empirical case studies. These demonstrate how grand narratives, central bank forward guidance, economic forecasts, finance models, business plans, visions of technological futures, and new era stories influence behaviour and become instruments of power in markets and societies. The market impact of shared calculative devices, social narratives, and contingent imaginaries underlines the rationale for a new form of narrative economics.

Uncertain Futures

Uncertain Futures PDF Author: Edmund Berger
Publisher: John Hunt Publishing
ISBN: 1785355015
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 146

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Book Description
Uncertain Futures: An Assessment of the Conditions of the Present provides a detailed look into the economic and political conditions of our present moment from a Marxist perspective. Key aspects of Marxist economic theory are illustrated in clear ways in order to provide an easy introduction to Marxist thought and their applicability. The book also examines the sluggish recovery from the Great Recession, in the context of the long-term feasibility of sustaining the capitalist system by placing it into a historical framework. It considers the necessity of social democratic reforms while calling for an anarchic re-invigoration of the politics of everyday life.

The History and Uncertain Future of Handwriting

The History and Uncertain Future of Handwriting PDF Author: Anne Trubek
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1620402157
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 193

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Book Description
The future of handwriting is anything but certain. Its history, however, shows how much it has affected culture and civilization for millennia. In the digital age of instant communication, handwriting is less necessary than ever before, and indeed fewer and fewer schoolchildren are being taught how to write in cursive. Signatures--far from John Hancock’s elegant model--have become scrawls. In her recent and widely discussed and debated essays, Anne Trubek argues that the decline and even elimination of handwriting from daily life does not signal a decline in civilization, but rather the next stage in the evolution of communication. Now, in The History and Uncertain Future of Handwriting, Trubek uncovers the long and significant impact handwriting has had on culture and humanity--from the first recorded handwriting on the clay tablets of the Sumerians some four thousand years ago and the invention of the alphabet as we know it, to the rising value of handwritten manuscripts today. Each innovation over the millennia has threatened existing standards and entrenched interests: Indeed, in ancient Athens, Socrates and his followers decried the very use of handwriting, claiming memory would be destroyed; while Gutenberg’s printing press ultimately overturned the livelihood of the monks who created books in the pre-printing era. And yet new methods of writing and communication have always appeared. Establishing a novel link between our deep past and emerging future, Anne Trubek offers a colorful lens through which to view our shared social experience.

Environmental Modelling

Environmental Modelling PDF Author: Keith Beven
Publisher: CRC Press
ISBN: 1498717977
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 393

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Book Description
Uncertainty in the predictions of science when applied to the environment is an issue of great current relevance in relation to the impacts of climate change, protecting against natural and man-made disasters, pollutant transport and sustainable resource management. However, it is often ignored both by scientists and decision makers, or interpreted as a conflict or disagreement between scientists. This is not necessarily the case, the scientists might well agree, but their predictions would still be uncertain and knowledge of that uncertainty might be important in decision making. Environmental Modelling: An Uncertain Future? introduces students, scientists and decision makers to: the different concepts and techniques of uncertainty estimation in environmental prediction the philosophical background to different concepts of uncertainty the constraint of uncertainties by the collection of observations and data assimilation in real-time forecasting techniques for decision making under uncertainty. This book will be relevant to environmental modellers, practitioners and decision makers in hydrology, hydraulics, ecology, meteorology and oceanography, geomorphology, geochemistry, soil science, pollutant transport and climate change. A companion website for the book can be found at www.uncertain-future.org.uk

How to Use Exploratory Scenario Planning (Xsp)

How to Use Exploratory Scenario Planning (Xsp) PDF Author: Jeremy Stapleton
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781558444058
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 100

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Book Description
Exploratory scenario planning (XSP) can help communities prepare for uncertainties posed by climate change, pandemics, automation, and other unprecedented twenty-first-century challenges. This manual is a comprehensive resource for anyone interested in using this emergent planning approach, which is effective at the local, regional, or organizational level. Through the XSP process, stakeholders envision and develop various potential futures (i.e., scenarios) and consider how to measure and prepare for each, rather than working toward a single shared vision for the future. Through instructive case studies, recommendations, sample workshop agendas, and more, this manual equips would-be practitioners with the background knowledge, procedural guidance, and practical strategies to implement this planning tool successfully. Readers will be prepared to facilitate--or even lead--an effective, impactful XSP process in their own settings.

Sustainable Thinking

Sustainable Thinking PDF Author: Rebekkah Smith Aldrich
Publisher: American Library Association
ISBN: 0838916953
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 166

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Book Description
This book will show you how to harness sustainable thinking to move forward with confidence into the unknown.

Future Imperfect

Future Imperfect PDF Author: David D. Friedman
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780511423772
Category : Technological forecasting
Languages : en
Pages : 351

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Book Description


A Vast Machine

A Vast Machine PDF Author: Paul N. Edwards
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262290715
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 547

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Book Description
The science behind global warming, and its history: how scientists learned to understand the atmosphere, to measure it, to trace its past, and to model its future. Global warming skeptics often fall back on the argument that the scientific case for global warming is all model predictions, nothing but simulation; they warn us that we need to wait for real data, “sound science.” In A Vast Machine Paul Edwards has news for these skeptics: without models, there are no data. Today, no collection of signals or observations—even from satellites, which can “see” the whole planet with a single instrument—becomes global in time and space without passing through a series of data models. Everything we know about the world's climate we know through models. Edwards offers an engaging and innovative history of how scientists learned to understand the atmosphere—to measure it, trace its past, and model its future.

The Great Upheaval

The Great Upheaval PDF Author: Arthur Levine
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 1421442582
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 334

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Book Description
How will America's colleges and universities adapt to remarkable technological, economic, and demographic change? The United States is in the midst of a profound transformation the likes of which hasn't been seen since the Industrial Revolution, when America's classical colleges adapted to meet the needs of an emerging industrial economy. Today, as the world shifts to an increasingly interconnected knowledge economy, the intersecting forces of technological innovation, globalization, and demographic change create vast new challenges, opportunities, and uncertainties. In this great upheaval, the nation's most enduring social institutions are at a crossroads. In The Great Upheaval, Arthur Levine and Scott Van Pelt examine higher and postsecondary education to see how it has changed to become what it is today—and how it might be refitted for an uncertain future. Taking a unique historical, cross-industry perspective, Levine and Van Pelt perform a 360-degree survey of American higher education. Combining historical, trend, and comparative analyses of other business sectors, they ask • how much will colleges and universities change, what will change, and how will these changes occur? • will institutions of higher learning be able to adapt to the challenges they face, or will they be disrupted by them? • will the industrial model of higher education be repaired or replaced? • why is higher education more important than ever? The book is neither an attempt to advocate for a particular future direction nor a warning about that future. Rather, it looks objectively at the contexts in which higher education has operated—and will continue to operate. It also seeks to identify likely developments that will aid those involved in steering higher education forward, as well as the many millions of Americans who have a stake in its future. Concluding with a detailed agenda for action, The Great Upheaval is aimed at policy makers, college administrators, faculty, trustees, and students, as well as general readers and people who work for nonprofits facing the same big changes.