The Techno-Apparatus of Bodily Production

The Techno-Apparatus of Bodily Production
Author: Josef Barla
Publisher: transcript Verlag
Total Pages: 233
Release: 2019-02-28
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 3839447445

What if the terms "technology" and "the body" did not refer to distinct phenomena interacting in one way or another? What if we understood their relationship as far more intimate - technologies as always already embodied, material bodies as always already technologized? What would it mean, then, to understand the relationship between technology and the body as a relation of indeterminacy? Expanding on the concept of the apparatus of bodily production in the work of Donna Haraway and Karen Barad, Josef Barla explores how material bodies along with their boundaries, properties, and meanings performatively materialize at sites where technological, biological, technoscientific, (bio-)political, and economic forces intra-act.

Feminist Theory and the Body

Feminist Theory and the Body
Author: Janet Price
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 502
Release: 2017-09-25
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1351567098

This Reader provides students with a comprehensive overview of differing feminist approaches to the body. Its wide range of contributions locate the important historical developments, interdisciplinary perspectives, and key discourses that have shaped this dynamic area of feminist theory.

The New Social Theory Reader

The New Social Theory Reader
Author: Steven Seidman
Publisher: Psychology Press
Total Pages: 428
Release: 2001
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 9780415188074

This comprehensive reader will give undergraduate students a structured introduction to the writers and works which have shaped the exciting and yet daunting field of social theory. Throughout the text, key figures are placed in debate with each other and the editorial introductions give an orienting overview of the main points at stake and the areas of agreement and disagreement between the protagonists. The first section sets out some of the main schools of thought, including Habermas and Honneth on New Critical Theory, Bourdieu and Luhmann on Institutional Structuralism and Jameson and Hall on Cultural Studies. Thereafter the reader becomes issues based, looking at: * Justice and Truth * Nationalism, Multiculturalism, Globalisation * gender, sexuality, race, post-coloniality The New SocialTheory Readeris an essential companion for students who will not just use it on their theory course but return to it again and again for theoretical foundations for substantive subjects and issues.

Simians, Cyborgs, and Women

Simians, Cyborgs, and Women
Author: Donna Haraway
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 313
Release: 2013-05-13
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1135964769

Simians, Cyborgs and Women is a powerful collection of ten essays written between 1978 and 1989. Although on the surface, simians, cyborgs and women may seem an odd threesome, Haraway describes their profound link as "creatures" which have had a great destabilizing place in Western evolutionary technology and biology. Throughout this book, Haraway analyzes accounts, narratives, and stories of the creation of nature, living organisms, and cyborgs. At once a social reality and a science fiction, the cyborg--a hybrid of organism and machine--represents transgressed boundaries and intense fusions of the nature/culture split. By providing an escape from rigid dualisms, the cyborg exists in a post-gender world, and as such holds immense possibilities for modern feminists. Haraway's recent book, Primate Visions, has been called "outstanding," "original," and "brilliant," by leading scholars in the field. (First published in 1991.)

Digital Expressions of the Self(ie)

Digital Expressions of the Self(ie)
Author: Avishek Ray
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 160
Release: 2024-02-06
Genre: Photography
ISBN: 1003847374

The book examines the social and cultural role of selfies in India. It looks at how the selfie, unlike the photograph, which was a gesture towards an external reality, remains intimately self-referential, yet reconfigures social ordering, identity formation, agency, and spaces in curious ways. This volume approaches questions about the construction and performance of the self through the digital selfie and uses this situated, contextualized, and culturally specific phenomenon as a site to explore the themes of self-making, place-making, gender, subjectivity, and power. Highlighting the specific contexts of production, the authors examine the array of self-expressive capabilities realized in a multitude of uses of the selfie that simultaneously reconfigure the self, the space, and the world. An important study of visual social media culture, the volume will be useful for interpreting everyday media experiences and will be of interest to students and researchers of image studies, visual studies, photography studies, visual culture, media studies, culture studies, cultural anthropology, digital humanities, popular culture, sociology of technology, and South Asian studies.

The Government of Things

The Government of Things
Author: Thomas Lemke
Publisher: NYU Press
Total Pages: 309
Release: 2021-09-28
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1479829935

"Critically engaging with some limitations of new materialist scholarship, Lemke draws on Foucault's concept of a "government of things" to propose a relational understanding of political ontologies"--

Robotic Knitting

Robotic Knitting
Author: Pat Treusch
Publisher: transcript Verlag
Total Pages: 167
Release: 2020-12-31
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 3839452031

As a reaction to typically dead-end debates on future human and robot collaboration that tend to be either dismissive or overly welcoming towards »cobot« technologies, this book provides a technofeminist intervention. Pat Treusch not only shows how both the fields of technofeminism and robotics can engage in a practical exchange through knitting, but also contributes a tangible example of coboting dynamics. Robotic Knitting re-negotiates the boundaries between formalisation and embodiment, craft and high-tech as well as useful and dysfunctional machines. It re-crafts the nature of collaboration between human and robot. This finally entails an alternative mode of relating - a mode that enables an account of careful coboting.

Reading »Black Mirror«

Reading »Black Mirror«
Author: German A. Duarte
Publisher: transcript Verlag
Total Pages: 335
Release: 2021-01-31
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 3839452325

Very few contemporary television programs provoke spirited responses quite like the dystopian series Black Mirror. This provocative program, infamous for its myriad apocalyptic portrayals of humankind's relationship with an array of electronic and digital technologies, has proven quite adept at offering insightful commentary on a number of issues contemporary society is facing. This timely collection draws on innovative and interdisciplinary theoretical frameworks to provide unique perspectives about how confrontations with such issues should be considered and understood through the contemporary post-media condition that drives technology use.

Gendered Configurations of Humans and Machines

Gendered Configurations of Humans and Machines
Author: Jan Büssers
Publisher: Verlag Barbara Budrich
Total Pages: 306
Release: 2021-02-15
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 3847416464

In numerous fields of science, work, and everyday life, humans and machines have been increasingly entangled, developing an ever-growing toolbox of interactions. These entanglements affect our daily lives and pose possibilities as well as restrictions, chances as well as challenges. The contributions of this volume tackle related issues by adopting a highly interdisciplinary perspective. How do digitalization and artificial intelligence affect gender relations? How can intersectionality be newly understood in an increasingly internationally networked world? This volume is a collection of contributions deriving from the “Interdisciplinary Conference on the Relations of Humans, Machines and Gender” which took place in Braunschweig (October 16–19, 2019). It also includes the keynotes given by Cecile Crutzen, Galit Wellner and Helen Verran.

Thomas Pynchon

Thomas Pynchon
Author: Niran Bahjat Abbas
Publisher: Fairleigh Dickinson Univ Press
Total Pages: 268
Release: 2003
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780838639542

This volume is a collection of essays by various academics looking at how identity is shaped, gendered, and contested throughout Pynchon's work. By exploring sociological, anthropological, literary, and political dimensions, the contributors revise important ideas in the debate over individualism using political and feminist theory and examine the different ways in which their writings embody, engage, and critique the official narratives generated by America's culture.