Common Worlds

Common Worlds
Author: Carl A. Maida
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 281
Release: 2018-11-23
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1442271159

Common Worlds: Paths Toward Sustainable Urbanism explores expert and lay approaches to sustainable urbanism, focusing on the politics and civic aesthetics of space and place; project-based learning and it consequences for the life chances of youth; and the prospect of intergenerational civic engagement. Extended case studies of sustainable urbanism describe areas undergoing demographic and socioeconomic change over the two decades since the end of the Cold War. The case studies, based upon participatory action research, are framed through the lens of transformational anthropology, which focuses on the structural factors and power relationships that contribute to social and economic disparities within a population. This approach is based upon principles of personal and group transformation, and it holds researchers responsible for collaborating with communities and groups in co-constructing research, thereby enhancing the constituents’ ability to carry out subsequent transformational change studies rooted in and shaped by the local community. Each case also focuses on a movement in support of aesthetic improvement, including preservation, conservation, and restoration efforts on behalf of parkland, open space, agricultural land, and marine wetlands in the face of external threats to their sustainability.

Common Worlds and Single Lives

Common Worlds and Single Lives
Author: Verena Keck
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 384
Release: 2020-08-20
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1000324788

In Pacific societies, local knowledge, which has been accumulated over thousands of years and is irreplaceable, is rapidly disappearing. With the extinction of languages, the ability to observe and interpret the world from varying perspectives is also being lost. At the same time, an enormous body of knowledge about nature, plants and animals is vanishing. However, in parallel with this, the people of the Pacific are confronted with new modes of knowledge and newly introduced technologies through imported educational systems, missions of various denominations, and the media. They do not passively assimilate this knowledge but adopt, adapt, and apply it in a syncretistic way.These changes will have permanent effects on the individual lives of people in the region and their knowledge about themselves and their surrounding 'world'. This stimulating book tracks the course of these developments and offers revealing insights into the complexity of Pacific peoples' responses to the process of globalization.

The Common Worlds of Children and Animals

The Common Worlds of Children and Animals
Author: Affrica Taylor
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 194
Release: 2018-10-08
Genre: Science
ISBN: 1317365836

The lives and futures of children and animals are linked to environmental challenges associated with the Anthropocene and the acceleration of human-caused extinctions. This book sparks a fascinating interdisciplinary conversation about child–animal relations, calling for a radical shift in how we understand our relationship with other animals and our place in the world. It addresses issues of interspecies and intergenerational environmental justice through examining the entanglement of children’s and animal’s lives and common worlds. It explores everyday encounters and unfolding relations between children and urban wildlife. Inspired by feminist environmental philosophies and indigenous cosmologies, the book poses a new relational ethics based upon the small achievements of child–animal interactions. It also provides an analysis of animal narratives in children’s popular culture. It traces the geo-historical trajectories and convergences of these narratives and of the lives of children and animals in settler-colonised lands. This innovative book brings together the fields of more-than-human geography, childhood studies, multispecies studies, and the environmental humanities. It will be of interest to students and scholars who are reconsidering the ethics of child–animal relations from a fresh perspective.

An Anthropological Trompe L'Oeil for a Common World

An Anthropological Trompe L'Oeil for a Common World
Author: Alberto Corsín Jiménez
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Total Pages: 198
Release: 2013-06-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0857459120

Our political age is characterized by forms of description as ‘big’ as the world itself: talk of ‘public knowledge’ and ‘public goods,’ ‘the commons’ or ‘global justice’ create an exigency for modes of governance that leave little room for smallness itself. Rather than question the politics of adjudication between the big and the small, this book inquires instead into the cultural epistemology fueling the aggrandizement and miniaturization of description itself. Incorporating analytical frameworks from science studies, ethnography, and political and economic theory, this book charts an itinerary for an internal anthropology of theorizing. It suggests that many of the effects that social theory uses today to produce insights are the legacy of baroque epistemological tricks. In particular, the book undertakes its own trompe l’oeil as it places description at perpendicular angles to emerging forms of global public knowledge. The aesthetic ‘trap’ of the trompe l’oeil aims to capture knowledge, for only when knowledge is captured can it be properly released.

Reconfiguring the Natures of Childhood

Reconfiguring the Natures of Childhood
Author: Affrica Taylor
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 174
Release: 2013-02-14
Genre: Education
ISBN: 1136672176

In this fascinating new book, Affrica Taylor encourages an exciting paradigmatic shift in the ways in which childhood and nature are conceived and pedagogically deployed, and invites readers to critically reassess the naturalist childhood discourses that are rife within popular culture and early years education.Through adopting a common worlds fram

Embodied Communication in Humans and Machines

Embodied Communication in Humans and Machines
Author: Ipke Wachsmuth
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Total Pages: 496
Release: 2008-09-04
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 0191552429

When people communicate face to face they don't just exchange verbal information. Rather, communication encompasses the whole body. Communication partners synchronize their body sway, and mimic or imitate each other's body postures and actions. They produce a multitude of manual and facial gestures that help to illustrate what is being said, show how communication partners feel, or or reveal verbal deception. Moreover, face-to-face communication takes place in shared contexts where partners jointly attend and refer to the same objects, often while working on joint tasks such as carrying a table or repairing a car together. Traditionally, communication research has neglected these parts of communication using the engineering model of signal transmission as the main theoretical metaphor. This book takes a new look at recent empirical findings in the cognitive and neurosciences, showing that the traditional approach is insufficient, and presenting a new interdisciplinary perspective, the Embodied Communication perspective. The core claim of the Embodied Communication perspective is that human communication involves parallel and highly interactive couplings between communication partners. These couplings range from low-level systems for performing and understanding instrumental actions, like the mirror system, to higher-systems that interpret symbols in a cultural context. The book can also serve as a guide for engineers who construct artificial agents and robots that should be able to interact with humans.

Unsettling the Colonial Places and Spaces of Early Childhood Education

Unsettling the Colonial Places and Spaces of Early Childhood Education
Author: Veronica Pacini-Ketchabaw
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 247
Release: 2015-03-24
Genre: Education
ISBN: 131767510X

Unsettling the Colonial Places and Spaces of Early Childhood Education uncovers and interrogates some of the inherent colonialist tensions that are rarely acknowledged and often unwittingly rehearsed within contemporary early childhood education. Through building upon the prior postcolonial interventions of prominent early childhood scholars, Unsettling the Colonial Places and Spaces of Early Childhood Education reveals how early childhood education is implicated in the colonialist project of predominantly immigrant (post)colonial settler societies. By politicizing the silences around these specifically settler colonialist tensions, it seeks to further unsettle the innocence presumptions of early childhood education and to offer some decolonizing strategies for early childhood practitioners and scholars. Grounding their inquiries in early childhood education, the authors variously engage with postcolonial theory, place theory, feminist philosophy, the ecological humanities and indigenous onto-epistemologies.

Reimagining Sustainability in Precarious Times

Reimagining Sustainability in Precarious Times
Author: Karen Malone
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 332
Release: 2017-01-17
Genre: Education
ISBN: 9811025509

This book reflects the considerable appeal of the Anthropocene and the way it stimulates new discussions and ideas for reimagining sustainability and its place in education in these precarious times. The authors explore these new imaginings for sustainability using varying theoretical perspectives in order to consider innovative ways of engaging with concepts that are now influencing the field of sustainability and education. Through their theoretical analysis, research and field work, the authors explore novel approaches to designing sustainability and sustainability education. These approaches, although diverse in focus, all highlight the complex interdependencies of the human and more-than-human world, and by unpacking binaries such as human/nature, nature/culture, subject/object and de-centring the human expose the complexities of an entangled human-nature relation that are shaping our understanding of sustainability. These messy relations challenge the well-versed mantras of anthropocentric exceptionalism in sustainability and sustainability education and offer new questions rather than answers for researchers, educators, and practitioners to explore. As working with new theoretical lenses is not always easy, this book also highlights the authors’ methods for approaching these ideas and imaginings.

The Constitution of Equality

The Constitution of Equality
Author: Thomas Christiano
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Total Pages: 320
Release: 2010-06-10
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0191613916

What is the ethical basis of democracy? And what reasons do we have to go along with democratic decisions even when we disagree with them? And when do we have reason to say that we may justly ignore democratic decisions? These questions must be answered if we are to have answers to some of the most important questions facing our global community, which include whether there is a human right to democracy and whether we must attempt to spread democracy throughout the globe. This book provides a philosophical account of the moral foundations of democracy and of liberalism. It shows how democracy and basic liberal rights are grounded in the principle of public equality, which tells us that in the establishment of law and policy we must treat persons as equals in ways they can see are treating them as equals. The principle of public equality is shown to be the fundamental principle of social justice. This account enables us to understand the nature and roles of adversarial politics and public deliberation in political life. It gives an account of the grounds of the authority of democracy. It also shows when the authority of democracy runs out. The author shows how the violations of democratic and liberal rights are beyond the legitimate authority of democracy, how the creation of persistent minorities in a democratic society, and the failure to ensure a basic minimum for all persons weaken the legitimate authority of democracy.

Infectious Liberty

Infectious Liberty
Author: Robert Mitchell
Publisher: Fordham Univ Press
Total Pages: 337
Release: 2021-04-13
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0823294617

Infectious Liberty traces the origins of our contemporary concerns about public health, world population, climate change, global trade, and government regulation to a series of Romantic-era debates and their literary consequences. Through a series of careful readings, Robert Mitchell shows how a range of elements of modern literature, from character-systems to free indirect discourse, are closely intertwined with Romantic-era liberalism and biopolitics. Eighteenth- and early-nineteenth century theorists of liberalism such as Adam Smith and Thomas Malthus drew upon the new sciences of population to develop a liberal biopolitics that aimed to coordinate differences among individuals by means of the culling powers of the market. Infectious Liberty focuses on such authors as Mary Shelley and William Wordsworth, who drew upon the sciences of population to develop a biopolitics beyond liberalism. These authors attempted what Roberto Esposito describes as an “affirmative” biopolitics, which rejects the principle of establishing security by distinguishing between valued and unvalued lives, seeks to support even the most abject members of a population, and proposes new ways of living in common. Infectious Liberty expands our understandings of liberalism and biopolitics—and the relationship between them—while also helping us to understand better the ways creative literature facilitates the project of reimagining what the politics of life might consist of. Infectious Liberty is available from the publisher on an open-access basis.