Numbered Lives

Numbered Lives PDF Author: Jacqueline Wernimont
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262039044
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 239

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Book Description
A feminist media history of quantification, uncovering the stories behind the tools and technologies we use to count, measure, and weigh our lives and realities. Anglo-American culture has used media to measure and quantify lives for centuries. Historical journal entries map the details of everyday life, while death registers put numbers to life's endings. Today we count our daily steps with fitness trackers and quantify births and deaths with digitized data. How are these present-day methods for measuring ourselves similar to those used in the past? In this book, Jacqueline Wernimont presents a new media history of western quantification, uncovering the stories behind the tools and technologies we use to count, measure, and weigh our lives and realities. Numbered Lives is the first book of its kind, a feminist media history that maps connections not only between past and present-day “quantum media” but between media tracking and long-standing systemic inequalities. Wernimont explores the history of the pedometer, mortality statistics, and the census in England and the United States to illuminate the entanglement of Anglo-American quantification with religious, imperial, and patriarchal paradigms. In Anglo-American culture, Wernimont argues, counting life and counting death are sides of the same coin—one that has always been used to render statistics of life and death more valuable to corporate and state organizations. Numbered Lives enumerates our shared media history, helping us understand our digital culture and inheritance.

Counting Bodies

Counting Bodies PDF Author: Molly Farrell
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190277327
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 297

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Book Description
Quantifiable citizenship in the form of birth certificates, census forms, and immigration quotas is so ubiquitous that today it appears ahistorical. Yet before the modern colonial era, there was neither a word for "population" in the sense of numbers of people, nor agreement that monarchs should count their subjects. Much of the work of naturalizing the view that people can be represented as populations took place far outside government institutions and philosophical treatises. It occurred instead in the work of colonial writers who found in the act of counting a way to imagine fixed boundaries between intermingling groups. Counting Bodies explores the imaginative, personal, and narrative writings that performed the cultural work of normalizing the enumeration of bodies. By repositioning and unearthing a literary pre-history of population science, the book shows that representing individuals as numbers was a central element of colonial projects. Early colonial writings that describe routine and even intimate interactions offer a window into the way people wove the quantifiable forms of subjectivity made available by population counts into everyday life. Whether trying to make sense of plantation slavery, frontier warfare, rapid migration, or global commerce, writers framed questions about human relationships across different cultures and generations in terms of population.

Counting Bodies

Counting Bodies PDF Author: Fedana Toussaint
Publisher: Archway Publishing
ISBN: 1480874809
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 143

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Book Description
This is a compilation of passionately written poetry that emotionally and vulnerably challenges love, life, mental health, and problems plaguing relationships in the technological era such as unfaithfulness, broken hearts, unrequited love, trauma and open wounds so intimately through clear communication that anyone can find a piece of themselves within its pages. The author hoped to skip pass the color of the roses and get to the raw points as authentically as she could in a millennial-like tone hoping to foster open discussions on topics that are usually glossed over.

Body Counts

Body Counts PDF Author: Sean Strub
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1451661959
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 432

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Book Description
Sean Strub arrived in Washington, D.C. in 1976 harbouring a terrifying secret: his attraction to men. As Strub explored the capital's political and social circles, he discovered a parallel world where powerful men lived double lives shrouded in shame. When the AIDS epidemic hit in the early '80s, Strub turned to activism to combat discrimination and demand research. Strub takes readers through his own diagnosis and inside ACT UP, the activist organisation that transformed a stigmatised cause into one of the defining political movements of our time.

Vietnam at War

Vietnam at War PDF Author: Phillip B. Davidson
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780195067927
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 868

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Book Description
Weaving together the histories of three distinct conflicts, Phillip B. Davidson follows the entire course of the Vietnam War, from the initial French skirmishes in 1946 to the dramatic fall of Saigon nearly thirty years later. His connecting thread is North Vietnamese General Vo Nguyen Giap, a remarkable figure who, with no formal military training, fashioned a rag-tag militia into one of the world's largest and most formidable armies. By focusing on Giap's role throughout the war, and by making available for the first time a wealth of recently declassified North Vietnamese documents, Davidson offers unprecedented insight into Hanoi's military strategies, an insight surpassed only by his inside knowledge of American operations and planning. Eminently qualified to write this history, Davidson--who served as chief intelligence officer under Generals Westmoreland and Abrams--tells firsthand the story of our tragic ordeal in Indochina and brings his unique understanding to bear on topics of continuing controversy, offering a chilling account, for example, of when and where the U.S. considered using nuclear weapons. The most comprehensive and authoritative history of the conflict to date, Vietnam at War sparkles with a rare immediacy, and brings to life in compelling fashion the war that tore America apart. We witness the chaos in Saigon when fireworks celebrating the Tet holiday are suddenly transformed into deadly rocket and machine-gun fire. We sit in on high-level meetings where General Westmoreland plans operations, or simply engages in some tough "headknocking" with subordinates. And in the end we learn that even the seemingly limitless resources of the U.S. military could not match the revolutionary "grand strategy" of the North Vietnamese. With its easy movement from intimate memoir to trenchant military analysis, from the conference rooms of generals to the battle-scarred streets of Hue, this is military history at its most gripping. A monumental, engrossing, and unforgettable chronicle, Vietnam at War is indispensable for anyone hoping to understand a conflict that still rages in the American psyche.

Feminism and War

Feminism and War PDF Author: Robin Riley
Publisher: Zed Books Ltd.
ISBN: 1848136684
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 447

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Book Description
Women across the globe are being dramatically affected by war as currently waged by the USA. But there has been little public space for dialogue about the complex relationship between feminism, women, and war. The editors of Feminism and War have brought together a diverse set of leading theorists and activists who examine the questions raised by ongoing American military initiatives, such as: What are the implications of an imperial nation/state laying claim to women's liberation? What is the relation between this claim and resulting American foreign policy and military action? Did American intervention and invasion in fact result in liberation for women in Afghanistan and Iraq? What multiple concepts are embedded in the phrase "women’s liberation"? How are these connected to the specifics of religion, culture, history, economics, and nation within current conflicts? What is the relation between the lives of Afghan and Iraqi women before and after invasion, and that of women living in the US? How do women who define themselves as feminists resist or acquiesce to this nation/state claim in current theory and organizing? Feminism and War reveals and critically analyzes the complicated ways in which America uses gender, race, class, nationalism, imperialism to justify, legitimate, and continue war. Each chapter builds on the next to develop an anti-racist, feminist politics that places imperialist power, and forms of resistance to it, central to its comprehensive analysis.

Politics

Politics PDF Author: Virginie Mamadouh
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351910272
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 847

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Book Description
Depending on the breadth or narrowness of the understanding of politics and the political, "politics" in human geography is defined as either the operation of power in all social relations or the workings of power directed to or by the state. This volume avoids the two extremes by acknowledging the transformation of approaches to the political in human geography over the past few decades but also by highlighting the continued importance of the more traditional state-based conception of politics. The selected articles are clustered around six themes: new agendas in political geography, state territoriality, international relations and globalization, internal territorial organisation and geographical scale, social movements and electoral participation, and identities and citizenship.

War, Violence, and Population

War, Violence, and Population PDF Author: James A. Tyner
Publisher: Guilford Press
ISBN: 1606234013
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 241

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Book Description
Grounded in theory and research, this book offers a spatial perspective on how and why populations are regulated and disciplined by mass violence—and why these questions matter for scholars concerned about social justice. James Tyner focuses on how states and other actors use acts of brutality to manage, administer, and control space for political and economic purposes. He shows how demographic analyses of fertility, mortality, and migration cannot be complete without taking war and genocide into account. Stark, in-depth case studies provide a powerful and provocative basis for retheorizing population geography. Winner--AAG Meridian Book Award for Outstanding Scholarly Work in Geography

Population and Progress in a Yoruba Town

Population and Progress in a Yoruba Town PDF Author: Elisha P. Renne
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 9780472089833
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 298

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Book Description
Argues that progress and fertility cannot be expected to follow a universal trajectory

The Perfect War

The Perfect War PDF Author: James William Gibson
Publisher: Open Road + Grove/Atlantic
ISBN: 0802196810
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 844

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Book Description
“Powerfully and persuasively . . . Gibson tells us why we were in Vietnam . . . a work of daring brilliance—an eye-opening chronicle of waste and self-delusion.” —Robert Olen Butler In this groundbreaking book, James William Gibson shatters the misled assumptions behind both liberal and conservative explanations for America’s failure in Vietnam. Gibson shows how American government and military officials developed a disturbingly limited concept of war—what he calls “technowar”—in which all efforts were focused on maximizing the enemy’s body count, regardless of the means. Consumed by a blind faith in the technology of destruction, American leaders failed to take into account their enemy’s highly effective guerrilla tactics. Indeed, technowar proved woefully inapplicable to the actual political and military strategies used by the Vietnamese, and Gibson reveals how US officials consistently falsified military records to preserve the illusion that their approach would prevail. Gibson was one of the first historians to question the fundamental assumptions behind American policy, and The Perfect War is a brilliant reassessment of the war—now republished with a new introduction by the author. “This book towers above all that has been written to date on Vietnam.” —LA Weekly

Embracing the Fog of War

Embracing the Fog of War PDF Author: Ben Connable
Publisher: Rand Corporation
ISBN: 0833068407
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 341

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Book Description
The unpredictable counterinsurgency environment challenges centralized, quantitative campaign assessment. A comprehensive examination of the centralized, quantitative approach to assessment, as described in the literature and doctrine and applied in two primary case studies (Vietnam and Afghanistan), reveals weaknesses and gaps and proposes an alternative process: contextual assessment.