Toward a New Culture of the Material

Toward a New Culture of the Material
Author: Frank Bauer
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Total Pages: 324
Release: 2024-09-02
Genre: Art
ISBN: 3110714884

Was wäre, wenn wir das multistabile, ambivalente und anpassungsfähige Verhalten aktiver Materie als offenen Gestaltungsspielraum verstehen? Die Beiträge dieses Bandes erkunden das formbildende Potenzial des Prozessua-len und Unverfügbaren - von mikrobi-ellem Co-Design über morphogeneti-sche Experimente und atmosphärische Kreationen bis hin zu Plastizität und Lebendigkeit in Architektur, Kunst und Begriffsentwicklung. Im Grenzgang zwischen analogen und digitalen For-men überschreiten die hier vorgestell-ten 19 Perspektiven disziplinäre und methodologische Grenzen und zielen darauf ab, ein neues Paradigma des Materiellen zwischen den Kulturen der Natur- und Geisteswissenschaften und des Designs zu begründen. Interdisziplinäre Beiträge zu aktiven Strukturen, adaptiven Materialien und Nachhaltigkeit Analoge Codes und Praktiken im Zeitalter des Digitalen Forschungsergebnisse des Exzellenzclusters "Matters of Activity. Image Space Material" an der Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin

Medical Materialities

Medical Materialities
Author: Aaron Parkhurst
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 241
Release: 2019-01-14
Genre: Medical
ISBN: 0429853661

Medical Materialities investigates possible points of cross-fertilisation between medical anthropology and material culture studies, and considers the successes and limitations of both sub-disciplines as they attempt to understand places, practices, methods, and cultures of healing. The editors present and expand upon a definition of ‘medical materiality’, namely the social impact of the agency of often mundane, at times non-clinical, materials within contexts of health and illness, as caused by the properties and affordances of this material. The chapters address material culture in various clinical and biomedical contexts and in discussions that link the body and healing. The diverse ethnographic case studies provide valuable insight into the way cultures of medicine are understood and practised.

Cultural Studies and Political Economy

Cultural Studies and Political Economy
Author: Robert E. Babe
Publisher: Lexington Books
Total Pages: 252
Release: 2010-05-10
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0739131982

This book addresses the notorious split between the two fields of cultural studies and political economy. Drawing on the works of Harold Innis, Theodor Adorno, Raymond Williams, Richard Hoggart, E.P. Thompson, and other major theorists in the two fields, Robert E. Babe shows that political economy can be reconciled to certain aspects of cultural studies, particularly with regards to cultural materialism. Uniting the two fields has proven to be a complex undertaking though it makes practical sense, given the close interaction between political economy and cultural studies. Babe examines the evolution of cultural studies over time and its changing relationship with political economy. The intersections between the two fields center around three subjects: the cultural biases of money, the time/space dialectic, and the dialectic of information.

Iconic Power

Iconic Power
Author: J. Alexander
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 507
Release: 2012-01-02
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1137012862

A collection of original articles that explore social aspects of the phenomenon of icon. Having experienced the benefits and realized the limitations of so called 'linguistic turn', sociology has recently acknowledged a need to further expand its horizons.

Elusive Archives

Elusive Archives
Author: Martin Brückner
Publisher: Material Culture Perspectives
Total Pages: 316
Release: 2021-08-27
Genre: Art
ISBN: 9781644532249

Elusive Archives asks how historians, librarians, and museum professionals can bring together scattered, lost, or otherwise forgotten objects into a provisional collection, an elusive archive. Addressing a wide range of objects, the authors' diverse approaches, varying formats, and broad scope of inquiries describe a new conceptual territory at the intersection of archival studies and material culture studies.

Handbook of Historical Studies in Education

Handbook of Historical Studies in Education
Author: Tanya Fitzgerald
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 935
Release: 2020-04-03
Genre: Education
ISBN: 981102362X

This book offers an in‐depth historiographical and comparative analysis of prominent theoretical and methodological debates in the field. Across each of the sections, contributors will draw on specific case studies to illustrate the origins, debates and tensions in the field and overview new trends, directions and developments. Each section includes an introduction that provides an overview of the theme and the overall emphasis within the section. In addition, each section has a concluding chapter that offers a critical and comparative analysis of the national case studies presented. As a Handbook, the emphasis is on deeper consideration of key issues rather than a more superficial and broader sweep. The book offers researchers, postgraduate and higher degree students as well as those teaching in this field a definitive text that identifies and debates key historiographical and methodological issues. The intent is to encourage comparative historiographical perspectives of the nominated issues that overview the main theoretical and methodological debates and to propose new directions for the field.

Living Books

Living Books
Author: Janneke Adema
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 351
Release: 2021-08-31
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 0262366452

Reimagining the scholarly book as living and collaborative--not as commodified and essentialized, but in all its dynamic materiality. In this book, Janneke Adema proposes that we reimagine the scholarly book as a living and collaborative project--not as linear, bound, and fixed, but as fluid, remixed, and liquid, a space for experimentation. She presents a series of cutting-edge experiments in arts and humanities book publishing, showcasing the radical new forms that book-based scholarly work might take in the digital age. Adema's proposed alternative futures for the scholarly book go beyond such print-based assumptions as fixity, stability, the single author, originality, and copyright, reaching instead for a dynamic and emergent materiality. Adema suggests ways to unbind the book, describing experiments in scholarly book publishing with new forms of anonymous collaborative authorship, radical open access publishing, and processual, living, and remixed publications, among other practices. She doesn't cast digital as the solution and print as the problem; the problem in scholarly publishing, she argues, is not print itself, but the way print has been commodified and essentialized. Adema explores alternative, more ethical models of authorship; constructs an alternative genealogy of openness; and examines opportunities for intervention in current cultures of knowledge production. Finally, asking why it is that we cut and bind our research together at all, she examines two book publishing projects that experiment with remix and reuse and try to rethink and reperform the book-apparatus by taking responsibility for the cuts they make.

Biocultural Creatures

Biocultural Creatures
Author: Samantha Frost
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 193
Release: 2016-05-19
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0822374358

In Biocultural Creatures, Samantha Frost brings feminist and political theory together with findings in the life sciences to recuperate the category of the human for politics. Challenging the idea of human exceptionalism as well as other theories of subjectivity that rest on a distinction between biology and culture, Frost proposes that humans are biocultural creatures who quite literally are cultured within the material, social, and symbolic worlds they inhabit. Through discussions about carbon, the functions of cell membranes, the activity of genes and proteins, the work of oxygen, and the passage of time, Frost recasts questions about the nature of matter, identity, and embodiment. In doing so, she elucidates the imbrication of the biological and cultural within the corporeal self. In remapping the relation of humans to their habitats and arriving at the idea that humans are biocultural creatures, Frost provides new theoretical resources for responding to political and environmental crises and for thinking about how to transform the ways we live.

Toward New Democratic Imaginaries - İstanbul Seminars on Islam, Culture and Politics

Toward New Democratic Imaginaries - İstanbul Seminars on Islam, Culture and Politics
Author: Seyla Benhabib
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 370
Release: 2016-09-23
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 3319418211

This volume combines rigorous empirical and theoretical analyses with political engagement to look beyond reductive short-hands that ignore the historical evolution and varieties of Islamic doctrine and that deny the complexities of Muslim societies' encounters with modernity itself. Are Islam and democracy compatible? Can we shed the language of 'Islam vs. the West' for new political imaginaries? The authors analyze struggles over political legitimacy since the Arab Spring and the rise of Al Qaeda and ISIS in their historical and political complexity across the MENA (Middle East and North Africa) region. Distinguishing multiculturalism from interculturalism and understanding multiple modernities, philosophers in the volume tease out the complexities of civilizational encounters. The volume also shows how the Paris massacres or the Danish caricature controversy do not remain confined to Europe but influence struggles and confrontations within Muslim societies. Gender and Islam are addressed from a comparative perspective bringing into conversation not only the experience of different Muslim countries with Islamic law but also by analysing Jewish family law.

The Material Culture of Failure

The Material Culture of Failure
Author: David Jeevendrampillai
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 232
Release: 2020-05-27
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1000184269

What happens when objects behave unexpectedly or fail to do what they ‘should’? Who defines failure? Is failure always bad? Rather than viewing concepts such as failure, incoherence or incompetence as antithetical to social life, this innovative new book examines the unexpected and surprising ways in which failure can lead to positive and creative results. Combining both theoretical and ethnographic approaches to failure, The Material Culture of Failure explores how failure manifests itself and operates in a variety of contexts. The editors present ten ethnographic encounters of failure – from areas as diverse as design, textiles, religion, beauty, and physical failure – covering Europe, North America, Asia, Africa, and the Arabian Gulf. Identifying common themes such as interpersonal, national and religious articulations of power and identity, the book shows some of the underlying assumptions that are revealed when materials fail, designs crumble, or things develop unexpectedly.The first anthropological study dedicated to theorizing failure, this innovative collection offers fresh insights based on the latest scholarship. Destined to stimulate a new area of research, the book makes a vital contribution to material culture studies and related social science theory.