Sonic Agency

Sonic Agency
Author: Brandon Labelle
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 191
Release: 2020-12-08
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1912685957

A timely exploration of whether sound and listening can be the basis of political change. In a world dominated by the visual, could contemporary resistances be auditory? This timely and important book from Goldsmiths Press highlights sound's invisible, disruptive, and affective qualities and asks whether the unseen nature of sound can support a political transformation. In Sonic Agency, Brandon LaBelle sets out to engage contemporary social and political crises by way of sonic thought and imagination. He divides sound's functions into four figures of resistance—the invisible, the overheard, the itinerant, and the weak—and argues for their role in creating alternative “unlikely publics” in which to foster mutuality and dissent. He highlights existing sonic cultures and social initiatives that utilize or deploy sound and listening to address conflict, and points to their work as models for a wider movement. He considers issues of disappearance and hidden culture, nonviolence and noise, creole poetics, and networked life, aiming to unsettle traditional notions of the “space of appearance” as the condition for political action and survival. By examining the experience of listening and being heard, LaBelle illuminates a path from the fringes toward hope, citizenship, and vibrancy. In a current climate that has left many feeling they have lost their voices, it may be sound itself that restores it to them.

Emergent Strategy

Emergent Strategy
Author: adrienne maree brown
Publisher: AK Press
Total Pages: 210
Release: 2017-03-20
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1849352615

In the tradition of Octavia Butler, here is radical self-help, society-help, and planet-help to shape the futures we want. Change is constant. The world, our bodies, and our minds are in a constant state of flux. They are a stream of ever-mutating, emergent patterns. Rather than steel ourselves against such change, Emergent Strategy teaches us to map and assess the swirling structures and to read them as they happen, all the better to shape that which ultimately shapes us, personally and politically. A resolutely materialist spirituality based equally on science and science fiction: a wild feminist and afro-futurist ride! adrienne maree brown, co-editor of Octavia’s Brood: Science Fiction from Social Justice Movements, is a social justice facilitator, healer, and doula living in Detroit.

Emergent phonology

Emergent phonology
Author: Diana Archangeli
Publisher: Language Science Press
Total Pages: 207
Release:
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 3961103356

To what extent do complex phonological patterns require the postulation of universal mechanisms specific to language? In this volume, we explore the Emergent Hypothesis, that the innate language-specific faculty driving the shape of adult grammars is minimal, with grammar development relying instead on cognitive capacities of a general nature. Generalisations about sounds, and about the way sounds are organised into meaningful units, are constructed in a bottom-up fashion: As such, phonology is emergent. We present arguments for considering the Emergent Hypothesis, both conceptually and by working through an extended example in order to demonstrate how an adult grammar might emerge from the input encountered by a learner. Developing a concrete, data-driven approach, we argue that the conventional, abstract notion of unique underlying representations is unmotivated; such underlying representations would require some innate principle to ensure their postulation by a learner. We review the history of the concept and show that such postulated forms result in undesirable phonological consequences. We work through several case studies to illustrate how various types of phonological patterns might be accounted for in the proposed framework. The case studies illustrate patterns of allophony, of productive and unproductive patterns of alternation, and cases where the surface manifestation of a feature does not seem to correspond to its morphological source. We consider cases where a phonetic distinction that is binary seems to manifest itself in a way that is morphologically ternary, and we consider cases where underlying representations of considerable abstractness have been posited in previous frameworks. We also consider cases of opacity, where observed phonological properties do not neatly map onto the phonological generalisations governing patterns of alternation.

Forms

Forms
Author: Caroline Levine
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 192
Release: 2017-01-03
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0691173435

A radically new way of thinking about form and context in literature, politics, and beyond Forms offers a powerful new answer to one of the most pressing problems facing literary, critical, and cultural studies today—how to connect form to political, social, and historical context. Caroline Levine argues that forms organize not only works of art but also political life—and our attempts to know both art and politics. Inescapable and frequently troubling, forms shape every aspect of our experience. Yet, forms don't impose their order in any simple way. Multiple shapes, patterns, and arrangements, overlapping and colliding, generate complex and unpredictable social landscapes that challenge and unsettle conventional analytic models in literary and cultural studies. Borrowing the concept of "affordances" from design theory, this book investigates the specific ways that four major forms—wholes, rhythms, hierarchies, and networks—have structured culture, politics, and scholarly knowledge across periods, and it proposes exciting new ways of linking formalism to historicism and literature to politics. Levine rereads both formalist and antiformalist theorists, including Cleanth Brooks, Michel Foucault, Jacques Rancière, Mary Poovey, and Judith Butler, and she offers engaging accounts of a wide range of objects, from medieval convents and modern theme parks to Sophocles's Antigone and the television series The Wire. The result is a radically new way of thinking about form for the next generation and essential reading for scholars and students across the humanities who must wrestle with the problem of form and context.

The Emergent Self

The Emergent Self
Author: William Hasker
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Total Pages: 258
Release: 2001-11-29
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 9780801487606

In The Emergent Self, William Hasker joins one of the most heated debates in analytic philosophy, that over the nature of mind. His provocative and clearly written book challenges physicalist views of human mental functioning and advances the concept of mind as an emergent individual. Hasker begins by mounting a compelling critique of the dominant paradigm in philosophy of mind, showing that contemporary forms of materialism are seriously deficient in confronting crucial aspects of experience. He further holds that popular attempts to explain the workings of mind in terms of mechanistic physics cannot succeed. He then criticizes the two versions of substance dualism most widely accepted today—Cartesian and Thomistic—and presents his own theory of emergent dualism. Unlike traditional substance dualisms, Hasker's theory recognizes the critical role of the brain and nervous system for mental processes. It also avoids the mechanistic reductionism characteristic of recent materialism. Hasker concludes by addressing the topic of survival following bodily death. After demonstrating the failure of materialist views to offer a plausible and coherent account of that possibility, he considers the implications of emergentism for notions of resurrection and the afterlife.

The Speculative City

The Speculative City
Author: Cecelia L. Chu
Publisher:
Total Pages: 256
Release: 2021-02-28
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 9781487524883

By attending to the divergent forces and actors involved in property development in different geopolitical contexts, The Speculative City illustrates both the novelty and historical continuity of urbanization in the twentieth-first century.

Emergent Ecologies

Emergent Ecologies
Author: Eben Kirksey
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 192
Release: 2015-11-27
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0822374803

In an era of global warming, natural disasters, endangered species, and devastating pollution, contemporary writing on the environment largely focuses on doomsday scenarios. Eben Kirksey suggests we reject such apocalyptic thinking and instead find possibilities in the wreckage of ongoing disasters, as symbiotic associations of opportunistic plants, animals, and microbes are flourishing in unexpected places. Emergent Ecologies uses artwork and contemporary philosophy to illustrate hopeful opportunities and reframe key problems in conservation biology such as invasive species, extinction, environmental management, and reforestation. Following the flight of capital and nomadic forms of life—through fragmented landscapes of Panama, Costa Rica, and the United States—Kirksey explores how chance encounters, historical accidents, and parasitic invasions have shaped present and future multispecies communities. New generations of thinkers and tinkerers are learning how to care for emergent ecological assemblages—involving frogs, fungal pathogens, ants, monkeys, people, and plants—by seeding them, nurturing them, protecting them, and ultimately letting go.

Political Practices and International Order

Political Practices and International Order
Author: Stefan Heuser
Publisher: LIT Verlag Münster
Total Pages: 404
Release: 2007
Genre: Christian sociology
ISBN: 382580920X

International order is one of the most challenging issues in political ethics today, and its place within the multifaceted fleld of politics is frequently debated. The diverse phenomena resulting from 'globalisation' - particularly in the wake of the end of the so-called Cold War - urge us to think about our 'world' in terms of a single political entity. Besides the existing international institutions, however, it is still open to question what this entity should be and what concrete political practices should correspond to it. In the essays collected in this book, political scientists, sociologists, philosophers, theologians and policy advisors explore how political practices can be institutionally localised without necessarily becoming incorporated into structures of governance. Political ethics, as presented in this book, seeks to address the particular practices of power, justice, and peace of citizens themselves, and to assess their relevance for the shaping of international insti

Emergent Warfare in Our Evolutionary Past

Emergent Warfare in Our Evolutionary Past
Author: Nam C Kim
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 392
Release: 2018-03-13
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1351365770

Why do we fight? Have we always been fighting one another? This book examines the origins and development of human forms of organized violence from an anthropological and archaeological perspective. Kim and Kissel argue that human warfare is qualitatively different from forms of lethal, intergroup violence seen elsewhere in the natural world, and that its emergence is intimately connected to how humans evolved and to the emergence of human nature itself.