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Author: Brian Silverstein
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 9811591962
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 125
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Book Description
This book examines the changing role of statistics in institutional reform in Turkey, and the unanticipated ways in which such changes transform livelihoods as well. Turkish agriculture is undergoing its most profound transformation since the establishment of the Republic in the 1920s. Seemingly minor technical adjustments in farmers’ reporting requirements and practices to collect better data on agriculture for statistics are also having a rapid and massive effect on farmers’ practices and livelihoods. The attempt to understand agriculture in Turkey in new ways is changing agriculture itself. The relationship between statistics and social and natural phenomena is thus performative, and such performativity undergirds a great deal of socio-technical change in the world. Drawing on fieldwork in Turkey with statisticians, farmers and agricultural extension technicians, the book shows how alongside deliberation about reforms, it is in and through this performativity that much of the work of institutional commensuration actually happens.
Author: Brian Silverstein
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 9811591962
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 125
Get Book Here
Book Description
This book examines the changing role of statistics in institutional reform in Turkey, and the unanticipated ways in which such changes transform livelihoods as well. Turkish agriculture is undergoing its most profound transformation since the establishment of the Republic in the 1920s. Seemingly minor technical adjustments in farmers’ reporting requirements and practices to collect better data on agriculture for statistics are also having a rapid and massive effect on farmers’ practices and livelihoods. The attempt to understand agriculture in Turkey in new ways is changing agriculture itself. The relationship between statistics and social and natural phenomena is thus performative, and such performativity undergirds a great deal of socio-technical change in the world. Drawing on fieldwork in Turkey with statisticians, farmers and agricultural extension technicians, the book shows how alongside deliberation about reforms, it is in and through this performativity that much of the work of institutional commensuration actually happens.
Author: Michael Millar
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 1448131804
Category : Mathematics
Languages : en
Pages : 160
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Book Description
This is a book for the observant and the curious. A book for people who take in their surroundings and wonder at the smallest detail: why? Above all, it's a book about numbers - those that surround us every day, and the intriguing stories behind them. From the 7-day week to 24-carat gold, Chanel No. 5 to five-star luxury, The Secret Lives of Numbers figures out the mysterious background to the numbers we encounter on a daily basis. Revealing the facts behind those figures, author Michael Millar outlines where to spot each digit, what it means and how it came to be in meticulously researched and entertaining entries, creating an absorbing and intelligent book that's perfect for any numbers fan. It's as easy as 1, 2, 3... Entries include: sports shirt numbers, firearms calibres, TV ratings, football rankings, poker scores, suncream factors, A4 paper, and more.
Author: Susan Reynolds Whyte
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521804691
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 212
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Book Description
Medicines are the core of treatment in biomedicine, as in many other medical traditions. As material things, they have social as well as pharmacological lives, with people and between people. They are tokens of healing and hope, as well as valuable commodities. Each chapter of this book shows drugs in the hands of particular actors: mothers in Manila, villagers in Burkina Faso, women in the Netherlands, consumers in London, market traders in Cameroon, pharmacists in Mexico, injectionists in Uganda, doctors in Sri Lanka, industrialists in India, and policymakers in Geneva. Each example is used to explore a different problem in the study of medicines, such as social efficacy, experiences of control, skepticism and cultural politics, commodification of health, the attraction of technology and the marketing of images and values. The book shows how anthropologists deal with the sociality of medicines, through their ethnography, their theorizing, and their uses of knowledge.
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.
Author: Ashley Ward
Publisher: Basic Books
ISBN: 1541600843
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 346
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Book Description
A rat will go out of its way to help a stranger in need. Lions have adopted the calves of their prey. Ants farm fungus in cooperatives. Why do we continue to believe that life in the animal kingdom is ruled by competition? In The Social Lives of Animals, biologist Ashley Ward takes us on a wild tour across the globe as he searches for a more accurate picture of how animals build societies. Ward drops in on a termite mating ritual (while his guides snack on the subjects), visits freelance baboon goatherds, and swims with a mixed family of whales and dolphins. Along the way, Ward shows that the social impulses we’ve long thought separated humans from other animals might actually be our strongest connection to them. Insightful, engaging, and often hilarious, The Social Lives of Animals demonstrates that you can learn more about animals by studying how they work together than by how they compete.
Author: Susanna B. Hecht
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022602413X
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 508
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Book Description
Forests are in decline, and the threats these outposts of nature face—including deforestation, degradation, and fragmentation—are the result of human culture. Or are they? This volume calls these assumptions into question, revealing forests’ past, present, and future conditions to be the joint products of a host of natural and cultural forces. Moreover, in many cases the coalescence of these forces—from local ecologies to competing knowledge systems—has masked a significant contemporary trend of woodland resurgence, even in the forests of the tropics. Focusing on the history and current use of woodlands from India to the Amazon, The Social Lives of Forests attempts to build a coherent view of forests sited at the nexus of nature, culture, and development. With chapters covering the effects of human activities on succession patterns in now-protected Costa Rican forests; the intersection of gender and knowledge in African shea nut tree markets; and even the unexpectedly rich urban woodlands of Chicago, this book explores forests as places of significant human action, with complex institutions, ecologies, and economies that have transformed these landscapes in the past and continue to shape them today. From rain forests to timber farms, the face of forests—how we define, understand, and maintain them—is changing.
Author: Danah Boyd
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300166311
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 296
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Book Description
Surveys the online social habits of American teens and analyzes the role technology and social media plays in their lives, examining common misconceptions about such topics as identity, privacy, danger, and bullying.
Author: Edward Frederick Finn
Publisher: Stanford University
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 272
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Book Description
This project explores how changing models of literary production are blurring or erasing the divisions between authors, critics and readers. Millions of cultural consumers are participating in previously closed literary conversations and expressing forms of mass distinction through their purchases and reviews of books. These traces of popular reading choices constitute a fresh perspective on elusive audience reactions to literature and reveal evolving networks of conversation. Employing network analysis methodologies and 'distant reading' of book reviews, recommendations and other digital traces of cultural distinction, I develop a new model for literary culture in America today. Through readings of the fiction and reception of Thomas Pynchon, Toni Morrison, David Foster Wallace and Junot Díaz, this model outlines the fundamental requirements for contemporary literary fame. My introduction outlines methodological tools I developed and situates them in the critical traditions of literary reception, cultural sociology and media theory before describing the digital ecologies that have emerged around literature online and their value. Chapter 1 explores the nature of literary fame through a case study of Thomas Pynchon, whose carefully guarded anonymity and ironic distance from capitalism are reflected in the networks his readers construct around his long, challenging books. In stark contrast, Toni Morrison, the subject of Chapter 2, has succeeded critically and commercially, tirelessly seeking out readers to form literary communities around her writing, most prominently through her collaboration with Oprah's Book Club. Chapter 3 considers David Foster Wallace and Junot Díaz and sets out a model for contemporary literary culture: a reading society that demands new forms of authorial reflexivity to mirror the collaborative, iterative nature of digital literary conversations. I conclude with a brief consideration of the exciting prospects and challenges for fiction in a world that reads more than ever but is growing disaffected with the material realities of literary production.
Author: Eric Gutstein
Publisher: Rethinking Schools
ISBN: 0942961544
Category : Mathematics
Languages : en
Pages : 192
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Book Description
In this unique collection, more than 30 articles show how to weave social justice issues throughout the mathematics curriculum, as well as how to integrate mathematics into other curricular areas. Rethinking Mathematics offers teaching ideas, lesson plans, and reflections by practitioners and mathematics educators. This is real-world math-math that helps students analyze problems as they gain essential academic skills. This book offers hope and guidance for teachers to enliven and strengthen their math teaching. It will deepen students' understanding of society and help prepare them to be critical, active participants in a democracy. Blending theory and practice, this is the only resource of its kind.
Author: Michael Goldman
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501771817
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 240
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Book Description
From the shaping of new homelands in the Cherokee Nation to the export of sand from Cambodia to shore up urban expansion in Singapore, The Social Lives of Land reveals the dynamics of contemporary social and political change. The editors of this volume bring together contributions from across multiple disciplines and geographic locations. The contributions showcase novel theoretical and empirical insights, analyzing how people are living on, with, and from their land. From Mozambique to India, Indonesia, Ecuador, and the colonial United States, the scholars in this collection uncover histories and retell stories with a focus on the lived experiences of rural and urban land dispossession and repossession. Contributors: Kati Álvarez, Clint Carroll, Flora Lu, Richard Mbunda, Gregg Mitman, Paul Nadasdy, Robert Nichols, Andrew Ofstehage, Laura Schoenberger, Kirsteen Shields, Emmanuel Sulle, Erik Swyngedouw, Gabriela Valdivia, Katherine Verdery, Callum Ward, Ciara Wirth, Emmanuel King Urey Yarkpawolo
