Report

Report
Author: United States. Congress. House
Publisher:
Total Pages: 2170
Release:
Genre: United States
ISBN:

Synthetic Aesthetics

Synthetic Aesthetics
Author: Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 372
Release: 2014-02-28
Genre: Art
ISBN: 026201999X

As synthetic biology transforms living matter into a medium for making, what is the role of design and its associated values?

Object-Oriented Feminism

Object-Oriented Feminism
Author: Katherine Behar
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
Total Pages: 246
Release: 2016-11-01
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1452952094

The essays in Object-Oriented Feminism explore OOF: a feminist intervention into recent philosophical discourses—like speculative realism, object-oriented ontology (OOO), and new materialism—that take objects, things, stuff, and matter as primary. Object-oriented feminism approaches all objects from the inside-out position of being an object too, with all of its accompanying political and ethical potentials. This volume places OOF thought in a long history of ongoing feminist work in multiple disciplines. In particular, object-oriented feminism foregrounds three significant aspects of feminist thinking in the philosophy of things: politics, engaging with histories of treating certain humans (women, people of color, and the poor) as objects; erotics, employing humor to foment unseemly entanglements between things; and ethics, refusing to make grand philosophical truth claims, instead staking a modest ethical position that arrives at being “in the right” by being “wrong.” Seeking not to define object-oriented feminism but rather to enact it, the volume is interdisciplinary in approach, with contributors from a variety of fields, including sociology, anthropology, English, art, and philosophy. Topics are frequently provocative, engaging a wide range of theorists from Heidegger and Levinas to Irigaray and Haraway, and an intriguing diverse array of objects, including the female body as fetish object in Lolita subculture; birds made queer by endocrine disruptors; and truth claims arising in material relations in indigenous fiction and film. Intentionally, each essay can be seen as an “object” in relation to others in this collection. Contributors: Irina Aristarkhova, University of Michigan; Karen Gregory, University of Edinburgh; Marina Gržinić, Slovenian Academy of Science and Arts; Frenchy Lunning, Minneapolis College of Art and Design; Timothy Morton, Rice University; Anne Pollock, Georgia Tech; Elizabeth A. Povinelli, Columbia University; R. Joshua Scannell, CUNY Graduate Center; Adam Zaretsky, VASTAL.

The Multispecies Salon

The Multispecies Salon
Author: Eben Kirksey
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 344
Release: 2014-10-20
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0822376989

A new approach to writing culture has arrived: multispecies ethnography. Plants, animals, fungi, and microbes appear alongside humans in this singular book about natural and cultural history. Anthropologists have collaborated with artists and biological scientists to illuminate how diverse organisms are entangled in political, economic, and cultural systems. Contributions from influential writers and scholars, such as Dorion Sagan, Karen Barad, Donna Haraway, and Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, are featured along with essays by emergent artists and cultural anthropologists. Delectable mushrooms flourishing in the aftermath of ecological disaster, microbial cultures enlivening the politics and value of food, and nascent life forms running wild in the age of biotechnology all figure in this curated collection of essays and artifacts. Recipes provide instructions on how to cook acorn mush, make cheese out of human milk, and enliven forests after they have been clear-cut. The Multispecies Salon investigates messianic dreams, environmental nightmares, and modest sites of biocultural hope. For additional materials see the companion website: www.multispecies-salon.org/ Contributors. Karen Barad, Caitlin Berrigan, Karin Bolender, Maria Brodine, Brandon Costelloe-Kuehn, David S. Edmunds, Christine Hamilton, Donna J. Haraway, Stefan Helmreich, Angela James, Lindsay Kelley, Eben Kirksey, Linda Noel, Heather Paxson, Nathan Rich, Anna Rodriguez, Dorion Sagan, Craig Schuetze, Nicholas Shapiro, Miriam Simun, Kim TallBear, Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing

The New Topping Book

The New Topping Book
Author: Dossie Easton
Publisher: SCB Distributors
Total Pages: 222
Release: 2011-11-07
Genre: Self-Help
ISBN: 1890159883

Two decades ago, this book (and its companion volume, The New Bottoming Book) began teaching tens of thousands of people the joyous arts of BDSM topping and bottoming - not just "how-to," but "why-to"... the insider details of emotional support and ethical interaction during kinky play. Since then, the growing popularity of BDSM, and the blossoming of the Internet as a source of information and connection, have created a whole new universe of possibilities for players. Now, the completely updated revised New Topping Book gives even more insights and ideas, updated for a new millennium, about how to be a successful, popular player! "Easton and Hardy tackle the Top... and bring that elusive critter down neatly and with a certain flair. This is good stuff, important stuff... an excellent guide to topping, both for the rank novice and for the player who just wants words to put to all the thoughts and feelings that have resisted categorization." - Laura Antoniou, Sandmutopian Guardian

Geontologies

Geontologies
Author: Elizabeth A. Povinelli
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 208
Release: 2016-09-15
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0822373815

In Geontologies Elizabeth A. Povinelli continues her project of mapping the current conditions of late liberalism by offering a bold retheorization of power. Finding Foucauldian biopolitics unable to adequately reveal contemporary mechanisms of power and governance, Povinelli describes a mode of power she calls geontopower, which operates through the regulation of the distinction between Life and Nonlife and the figures of the Desert, the Animist, and the Virus. Geontologies examines this formation of power from the perspective of Indigenous Australian maneuvers against the settler state. And it probes how our contemporary critical languages—anthropogenic climate change, plasticity, new materialism, antinormativity—often unwittingly transform their struggles against geontopower into a deeper entwinement within it. A woman who became a river, a snakelike entity who spawns the fog, plesiosaurus fossils and vast networks of rock weirs: in asking how these different forms of existence refuse incorporation into the vocabularies of Western theory Povinelli provides a revelatory new way to understand a form of power long self-evident in certain regimes of settler late liberalism but now becoming visible much further beyond.

Everything Lost Is Found Again

Everything Lost Is Found Again
Author: Will McGrath
Publisher:
Total Pages: 224
Release: 2018
Genre: BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY
ISBN: 9781945814624

Funny and heartfelt, this amalgamation of memoir and essay collection tells the story of twenty months the author spent in Lesotho, the small, landlocked kingdom surrounded by South Africa. There he finds a spirit of joyful absurdity and resolve, surrounded by people who take strangers' hands as they walk down the road, people who--with sweetest face--drop the dirtiest jokes in the southern hemisphere. But Lesotho is also a place where shepherds exact Old Testament retribution, where wounded pride incites murder and families are devastated by the AIDS epidemic. Driven by a spirit of openhearted cultural exchange in the style of Bill Bryson's In a Sunburned Country and Alexandra Fuller's Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness, Will McGrath's Everything Lost Is Found Again is a love-drunk ballad to Lesotho, infusing humor and heart into pop ethnography.