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The compelling and little-known history of satellite communications that reveals the Soviet and Eastern European roles in the development of its infrastructure. Taking its title from Hannah Arendt’s description of artificial earth satellites, No Heavenly Bodies explores the history of the first two decades of satellite communications. Christine E. Evans and Lars Lundgren trace how satellite communications infrastructure was imagined, negotiated, and built across the Earth’s surface, including across the Iron Curtain. While the United States’ and European countries’ roles in satellite communications are well documented, Evans and Lundgren delve deep into the role the Soviet Union and ...
How twentieth-century scientists used proxies to understand historic climates, shaping scientific analyses of the past and the future. Unlike our daily reckoning with the weather, our experience of climate must be mediated through methods that measure the ebb and flow of climate, such as computer models, instruments like thermometers, and organic and inorganic remains known as “proxies.” Climate by Proxy by Melissa Charenko explores how scientists read the record of past climates and how their readings have engendered particular understandings of climate. Charenko focuses on the twentieth century, a period when scientists in Europe and North America began to believe that climate had a dy...
Focusing on the body as a visual and discursive platform across public space, we study marginalization as a sociocultural practice and hegemonic schema. Whereas mass incarceration and law enforcement readily feature in discussions of institutionalized racism, we differently highlight understudied sites of normalization and exclusion. Our combined effort centers upon physical contexts (skeletons, pageant stages, gentrifying neighborhoods), discursive spaces (medical textbooks, legal battles, dance pedagogy, vampire narratives) and philosophical arenas (morality, genocide, physician-assisted suicide, cryonic preservation, transfeminism) to deconstruct seemingly intrinsic connections between body and behavior, Whiteness and normativity.
This book is one English professor's assessment of university life in the early 21st century. From rising mental health concerns and trigger warnings to learning management systems and the COVID pandemic, Christopher Schaberg reflects on the rapidly evolving landscape of higher education. Adopting an interdisciplinary public humanities approach, Schaberg considers the frequently exhausting and depressing realities of college today. Yet in these meditations he also finds hope: collaboration, mentoring, less grading, surface reading, and other pedagogical strategies open up opportunities to reinvigorate teaching and learning in the current turbulent decade.
Lisa Messeri offers an ethnographic exploration of a contemporary community of Los Angeles-based storytellers, media artists, and tech innovators formed around virtual reality, believing that it could remedy society’s ills.
In Placing Outer Space Lisa Messeri traces how the place-making practices of planetary scientists transform the void of space into a cosmos filled with worlds that can be known and explored. Making planets into places is central to the daily practices and professional identities of the astronomers, geologists, and computer scientists Messeri studies. She takes readers to the Mars Desert Research Station and a NASA research center to discuss ways scientists experience and map Mars. At a Chilean observatory and in MIT's labs she describes how they discover exoplanets and envision what it would be like to inhabit them. Today’s planetary science reveals the universe as densely inhabited by evocative worlds, which in turn tells us more about Earth, ourselves, and our place in the universe.
This book offers an introduction to the field of outer space studies by means of a selection of "otherwhere ethnographies," fine-grained accounts of how space exploration is being reconfigured in an age where major nation-states are no longer its only prime movers. A collective of social scientists and humanities scholars provide detailed accounts of how space research and space enterprises are being rethought in an age where extraterrestrial exploration is no longer the monopoly of a handful of superpowers.
The Routledge Companion to Media Anthropology provides a broad overview of the widening and flourishing area of media anthropology, and outlines key themes, debates, and emerging directions. The Routledge Companion to Media Anthropology draws together the work of scholars from across the globe, with rich ethnographic studies that address a wide range of media practices and forms. Comprising 41 chapters by a team of international contributors, the Companion is divided into three parts: Histories Approaches Thematic Considerations. The chapters offer wide-ranging explorations of how forms of mediation influence communication, social relationships, cultural practices, participation, and social ...
Location Technologies in International Context offers the first international account of location technologies (in an expanded sense) and brings together a range of contributions on these technologies and their various cultures of use within the Global South. This collection asks: How, within the Global South, do location technologies differ across national markets, geo-linguistic communities and cultural contexts? What are the contrasting or shared meanings and practices associated with location technologies? And what innovative practices and new (or reinvigorated) theory may emerge from attention to the Global South? In exploring these questions, the collection contributes to our understanding of social, cultural, gendered and political relations on a global and local scale. Location Technologies in International Context is ideal for a range of disciplines, including cultural, communication and media studies; anthropology, sociology and geography; new media, Internet and mobile studies; and informatics and development studies.
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