Landscapes of Collectivity in the Life Sciences

Landscapes of Collectivity in the Life Sciences
Author: Snait B. Gissis
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 433
Release: 2018-01-12
Genre: Science
ISBN: 0262036851

Broad perspective on collectivity in the life sciences, from microorganisms to human consensus, and the theoretical and empirical opportunities and challenges. Many researchers and scholars in the life sciences have become increasingly critical of the traditional methodological focus on the individual. This volume counters such methodological individualism by exploring recent and influential work in the life sciences that utilizes notions of collectivity, sociality, rich interactions, and emergent phenomena as essential explanatory tools to handle numerous persistent scientific questions in the life sciences. The contributors consider case studies of collectivity that range from microorganisms to human consensus, discussing theoretical and empirical challenges and the innovative methods and solutions scientists have devised. The contributors offer historical, philosophical, and biological perspectives on collectivity, and describe collective phenomena seen in insects, the immune system, communication, and human collectivity, with examples ranging from cooperative transport in the longhorn crazy ant to the evolution of autobiographical memory. They examine ways of explaining collectivity, including case studies and modeling approaches, and explore collectivity's explanatory power. They present a comprehensive look at a specific case of collectivity: the Holobiont notion (the idea of a multi-species collective, a host and diverse microorganisms) and the hologenome theory (which posits that the holobiont and its hologenome are a unit of adaption). The volume concludes with reflections on the work of the late physicist Eshel Ben-Jacob, pioneer in the study of collective phenomena in living systems. Contributors Oren Bader, John Beatty, Dinah R. Davison, Daniel Dor, Ofer Feinerman, Raghavendra Gadagkar, Scott F. Gilbert, Snait B. Gissis, Deborah M. Gordon, James Griesemer, Zachariah I. Grochau-Wright, Erik R. Hanschen, Eva Jablonka, Mohit Kumar Jolly, Anat Kolumbus, Ehud Lamm, Herbert Levine, Arnon Levy, Xue-Fei Li, Elisabeth A. Lloyd, Yael Lubin, Eva Maria Luef, Ehud Meron, Richard E. Michod, Samir Okasha, Simone Pika, Joan Roughgarden, Eugene Rosenberg, Ayelet Shavit, Yael Silver, Alfred I. Tauber, Ilana Zilber-Rosenberg

Always More Than One

Always More Than One
Author: Erin Manning
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 325
Release: 2013-01-09
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 0822395827

In Always More Than One, the philosopher, visual artist, and dancer Erin Manning explores the concept of the "more than human" in the context of movement, perception, and experience. Working from Whitehead's process philosophy and Simondon's theory of individuation, she extends the concepts of movement and relation developed in her earlier work toward the notion of "choreographic thinking." Here, she uses choreographic thinking to explore a mode of perception prior to the settling of experience into established categories. Manning connects this to the concept of "autistic perception," described by autistics as the awareness of a relational field prior to the so-called neurotypical tendency to "chunk" experience into predetermined subjects and objects. Autistics explain that, rather than immediately distinguishing objects—such as chairs and tables and humans—from one another on entering a given environment, they experience the environment as gradually taking form. Manning maintains that this mode of awareness underlies all perception. What we perceive is never first a subject or an object, but an ecology. From this vantage point, she proposes that we consider an ecological politics where movement and relation take precedence over predefined categories, such as the neurotypical and the neurodiverse, or the human and the nonhuman. What would it mean to embrace an ecological politics of collective individuation?

Architecture and Collective Life

Architecture and Collective Life
Author: Penny Lewis
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 416
Release: 2021-10-28
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 1000457508

This book addresses the complex relationship between architecture and public life. It’s a study of architecture and urbanism as cultural activity that both reflects and gives shape to our social relations, public institutions and political processes. Written by an international range of contributors, the chapters address the intersection of public life and the built environment around the themes of authority and planning, the welfare state, place and identity and autonomy. The book covers a diverse range of material from Foucault’s evolving thoughts on space to land-scraping leisure centres in inter-war Belgium. It unpacks concepts such as ‘community’ and ‘collectivity’ alongside themes of self-organisation and authorship. Architecture and Collective Life reflects on urban and architectural practice and historical, political and social change. As such this book will be of great interest to students and academics in architecture and urbanism as well as practicing architects.

The Collective

The Collective
Author: Alison Gaylin
Publisher: HarperCollins
Total Pages: 352
Release: 2021-11-02
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0063000938

"Chilling...this terrific novel is...propelled by an iron-tight plot that becomes increasingly tense." --New York Times Book Review "It’s a nerve-shredding, emotionally harrowing ride. Don’t miss it.” —Megan Abbott, New York Times bestselling author The USA Today bestselling and Edgar Award–winning author of Never Look Back and If I Die Tonight asks how far a grieving mother will go to right a tragic wrong in this propulsive novel of psychological suspense. Camille Gardener is a grieving—and angry—mother who, five years after her daughter’s death, is still obsessed with the privileged young man she believes to be responsible. When her rash actions draw the attention of a secret group of women—the collective— Camille is drawn into a dark web where these mothers share their wildly different stories of loss as well as their desire for justice in a world where privilege denies accountability. Fueled by mutual rage, the collective members devise and act out retribution fantasies via precise, anonymous, highly coordinated revenge killings. As Camille struggles to comprehend whether this is a role-playing exercise or terrifying reality, she must decide if these women are truly avenging angels or monsters. Becoming more deeply enmeshed in the group, Camille learns truths about the collective—and about herself—that she may not be able to survive

Winter Recipes from the Collective

Winter Recipes from the Collective
Author: Louise Glück
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Total Pages: 49
Release: 2021-10-26
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 0374604118

WINNER OF THE NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE A haunting book by a poet whose voice speaks of all our lifetimes Louise Glück’s thirteenth book is among her most haunting. Here as in the Wild Iris there is a chorus, but the speakers are entirely human, simultaneously spectral and ancient. Winter Recipes from the Collective is chamber music, an invitation into that privileged realm small enough for the individual instrument to make itself heard, dolente, its line sustained, carried, and then taken up by the next instrument, spirited, animoso, while at the same time being large enough to contain a whole lifetime, the inconceivable gifts and losses of old age, the little princesses rattling in the back of a car, an abandoned passport, the ingredients of an invigorating winter sandwich, a sister’s death, the joyful presence of the sun, its brightness measured by the darkness it casts. “Some of you will know what I mean,” the poet says, by which she means, some of you will follow me. Hers is the sustaining presence, the voice containing all our lifetimes, “all the worlds, each more beautiful than the last.” This magnificent book couldn’t have been written by anyone else, nor could it have been written by the poet at any other time in her life.

The Collective Journey

The Collective Journey
Author: Lisa Potter
Publisher: Arrows & Stones
Total Pages: 132
Release: 2022-02-11
Genre:
ISBN: 9781957369020

It no longer has to be lonely at the top. In fact, if it is, it's almost guaranteed that your leadership dreams will die with you and your influence will not enrich coming generations. Lisa Potter developed The Collective Journey to effectively engage younger female leaders in a personal as well as a shared journey toward life-giving transformation and wholeness. Through Lisa's powerful analogies, profound insights, and rich exegesis, you'll discover: The importance of taking care of your soul. The power of your story. The power of God's design in you. The necessity of developing a community of support and friendships. Lisa Potter has set a "thoughtfully and delightfully decorated" table for women in all seasons of life and leadership, and there is a place-complete with your name on a place card-at that table for you.

Handmade Lives

Handmade Lives
Author:
Publisher: Firefall Editions
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2002
Genre: Canyon (Calif.)
ISBN: 9780915090150

HANDMADE LIVES is a cultural cross-section of a time and place still evolving: the legacy of the love generation. Inside the handmade houses, of Canyon California 1967-74, the flower children fully flowered and grew their own rebellious and poetic children, who turned away from the unrestrained experiments of their parents, yet took their understanding from them. HANDMADE LIVES is a collection of 44 intimate narratives, which detail the life of a small California hill town, that burned and rebuilt, that fought the water company and won, and in the process made worldwide news in the late 1960s. "They lived our dream!" sayeth the white rabbitt.

The Collectivity of Life

The Collectivity of Life
Author: Joel Wendland
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 229
Release: 2016-02-01
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1498513964

The Collectivity of Life is a study of autobiographical writing and oral histories situated in the late twentieth century United States. The central thesis is that by studying how the authors of these narratives articulate space in their stories, we can uncover a recurring critique of meritocratic individualism and reconstruct a counter-mythology that locates social mobility in collectivist experiences. Fourteen autobiographical works are studied, including those of Malcolm X, Audre Lorde, Barack Obama, and numerous other from multiple ethnic and several regions of the U.S., ranging from 1964 through 2008. More than 40 oral histories housed in archives in several regions of the country help to establish the book’s goal. By using a concept of space, this book shifts the focus of personal narrative from the internal resources of the individual to networks of support and collective efforts in the formation of their identities and the basis of their life accomplishments.

A Collective Blooming

A Collective Blooming
Author: Joe Lightfoot
Publisher:
Total Pages: 140
Release: 2020-09-13
Genre:
ISBN:

Somewhere along the way, we lost touch with each other. And unless we rediscover the communal bonds that define us as human beings, then we face the very real prospect of an increasingly dystopian future.In A Collective Blooming, Joe Lightfoot deconstructs the dominant stories of the day and puts forward a bold new narrative of community focused transformation. He introduces the Conscious Change Collective, a whole new kind of mutual aid community and invites you to join the compassionate wave of change that is gaining momentum all around the world. It's a book that not only describes the inner journey towards becoming a true Community Creature, but also offers up the practical steps for how to get there.