Making Worlds

Author: Claudia Breger
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231550693
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 474

Book Description
The twenty-first century has witnessed a resurgence of economic inequality, racial exclusion, and political hatred, causing questions of collective identity and belonging to assume new urgency. In Making Worlds, Claudia Breger argues that contemporary European cinema provides ways of thinking about and feeling collectivity that can challenge these political trends. Breger offers nuanced readings of major contemporary films such as Michael Haneke’s The White Ribbon, Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Biutiful, Fatih Akın’s The Edge of Heaven, Asghar Farhadi’s A Separation, and Aki Kaurismäki’s refugee trilogy, as well as works by Jean-Luc Godard and Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Through a new model of cinematic worldmaking, Breger examines the ways in which these works produce unexpected and destabilizing affects that invite viewers to imagine new connections among individuals or groups. These films and their depictions of refugees, immigrants, and communities do not simply counter dominant political imaginaries of hate and fear with calls for empathy or solidarity. Instead, they produce layered sensibilities that offer the potential for greater openness to others’ present, past, and future claims. Drawing on the work of Latour, Deleuze, and Rancière, Breger engages questions of genre and realism along with the legacies of cinematic modernism. Offering a rich account of contemporary film, Making Worlds theorizes the cinematic creation of imaginative spaces in order to find new ways of responding to political hatred.

Making Worlds

Author: Susan Hardy Aiken
Publisher: University of Arizona Press
ISBN: 9780816517800
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 340

Book Description
Making Worlds brings together thirty-one distinguished feminist activists, artists, and scholars to address a series of questions that resonate with increasing urgency in our current global environment: How is space imagined, represented, arranged, and distributed? What are the lived consequences of these configurations? And how are these questions affected by gender and other socially constructed categories of "difference"—race, ethnicity, sexuality, class, nationality? How are the symbolic formations of place and space marked by cultural ideologies that carry across into the places and spaces we inhabit, the boundaries and institutions we maintain? In recent years these questions have occasioned intensifying debates, but they have seldom extended beyond the boundaries of individual academic disciplines or crossed the divide that has traditionally separated the academy from the "outside" world. Making Worlds both questions and traverses those divisions by combining personal essays, activist political rhetoric, oral history, poetry, iconography, and performance art with interdisciplinary academic discourses. Representing a wide range of perspectives, Making Worlds develops a provocative conversation about gender and spatiality in the interwoven symbolic and material environments we create. The contributors engage such issues as the body as site of symbolic action, fabrication, and desire; the place and play of sexualities; the cultural implications of everyday life—home, travel, work, childbirth, food, disease, and death; technology and mass media; surveillance, confinement, and the law; the dynamics of race and ethnicity; imperialism, oppression, and resistance; the politics of urban spaces; landscape and cultural memory; the experience of time; and the nature of "Nature." For students and scholars in cultural studies, geography, literary criticism, anthropology, history, and women's studies, it offers new ways of thinking about space, place, and the spatial contexts of social thought and action.

Making the Modern World

Author: Vaclav Smil
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1118697960
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 263

Book Description
How much further should the affluent world push its material consumption? Does relative dematerialization lead to absolute decline in demand for materials? These and many other questions are discussed and answered in Making the Modern World: Materials and Dematerialization. Over the course of time, the modern world has become dependent on unprecedented flows of materials. Now even the most efficient production processes and the highest practical rates of recycling may not be enough to result in dematerialization rates that would be high enough to negate the rising demand for materials generated by continuing population growth and rising standards of living. This book explores the costs of this dependence and the potential for substantial dematerialization of modern economies. Making the Modern World: Materials and Dematerialization considers the principal materials used throughout history, from wood and stone, through to metals, alloys, plastics and silicon, describing their extraction and production as well as their dominant applications. The evolving productivities of material extraction, processing, synthesis, finishing and distribution, and the energy costs and environmental impact of rising material consumption are examined in detail. The book concludes with an outlook for the future, discussing the prospects for dematerialization and potential constrains on materials. This interdisciplinary text provides useful perspectives for readers with backgrounds including resource economics, environmental studies, energy analysis, mineral geology, industrial organization, manufacturing and material science.

Worlds in the Making

Author: Svante Arrhenius
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Cosmogony
Languages : en
Pages : 258

Book Description

Making the World Work Better

Author: Kevin Maney
Publisher: Pearson Education
ISBN: 0132755130
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 495

Book Description
Thomas J Watson Sr’s motto for IBM was THINK, and for more than a century, that one little word worked overtime. In Making the World Work Better: The Ideas That Shaped a Century and a Company, journalists Kevin Maney, Steve Hamm, and Jeffrey M. O’Brien mark the Centennial of IBM’s founding by examining how IBM has distinctly contributed to the evolution of technology and the modern corporation over the past 100 years. The authors offer a fresh analysis through interviews of many key figures, chronicling the Nobel Prize-winning work of the company’s research laboratories and uncovering rich archival material, including hundreds of vintage photographs and drawings. The book recounts the company’s missteps, as well as its successes. It captures moments of high drama – from the bet-the-business gamble on the legendary System/360 in the 1960s to the turnaround from the company’s near-death experience in the early 1990s. The authors have shaped a narrative of discoveries, struggles, individual insights and lasting impact on technology, business and society. Taken together, their essays reveal a distinctive mindset and organizational culture, animated by a deeply held commitment to the hard work of progress. IBM engineers and scientists invented many of the building blocks of modern information technology, including the memory chip, the disk drive, the scanning tunneling microscope (essential to nanotechnology) and even new fields of mathematics. IBM brought the punch-card tabulator, the mainframe and the personal computer into the mainstream of business and modern life. IBM was the first large American company to pay all employees salaries rather than hourly wages, an early champion of hiring women and minorities and a pioneer of new approaches to doing business--with its model of the globally integrated enterprise. And it has had a lasting impact on the course of society from enabling the US Social Security System, to the space program, to airline reservations, modern banking and retail, to many of the ways our world today works. The lessons for all businesses – indeed, all institutions – are powerful: To survive and succeed over a long period, you have to anticipate change and to be willing and able to continually transform. But while change happens, progress is deliberate. IBM – deliberately led by a pioneering culture and grounded in a set of core ideas – came into being, grew, thrived, nearly died, transformed itself... and is now charting a new path forward for its second century toward a perhaps surprising future on a planetary scale.

Making Virtual Worlds

Author: Thomas Malaby
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 0801457750
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 179

Book Description
The past decade has seen phenomenal growth in the development and use of virtual worlds. In one of the most notable, Second Life, millions of people have created online avatars in order to play games, take classes, socialize, and conduct business transactions. Second Life offers a gathering point and the tools for people to create a new world online. Too often neglected in popular and scholarly accounts of such groundbreaking new environments is the simple truth that, of necessity, such virtual worlds emerge from physical workplaces marked by negotiation, creation, and constant change. Thomas Malaby spent a year at Linden Lab, the real-world home of Second Life, observing those who develop and profit from the sprawling, self-generating system they have created. Some of the challenges created by Second Life for its developers were of a very traditional nature, such as how to cope with a business that is growing more quickly than existing staff can handle. Others are seemingly new: How, for instance, does one regulate something that is supposed to run on its own? Is it possible simply to create a space for people to use and then not govern its use? Can one apply these same free-range/free-market principles to the office environment in which the game is produced? "Lindens"—as the Linden Lab employees call themselves—found that their efforts to prompt user behavior of one sort or another were fraught with complexities, as a number of ongoing processes collided with their own interventions. Malaby thoughtfully describes the world of Linden Lab and the challenges faced while he was conducting his in-depth ethnographic research there. He shows how the workers of a very young but quickly growing company were themselves caught up in ideas about technology, games, and organizations, and struggled to manage not only their virtual world but also themselves in a nonhierarchical fashion. In exploring the practices the Lindens employed, he questions what was at stake in their virtual world, what a game really is (and how people participate), and the role of the unexpected in a product like Second Life and an organization like Linden Lab.

Making Social Worlds

Author: W. Barnett Pearce
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 0470766409
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 272

Book Description
Making Social Worlds: A Communication Perspective offers the most accessible introduction to the tools and concepts of CMM – Coordinated Management of Meaning – one of the groundbreaking theories of speech communication. Draws upon advances in research for the most up-to-date concepts in speech communication Defines the 'critical moments' of communication for students and practitioners; encouraging us to view communication as a two-sided process of coordinating actions and making/managing meanings Questions how we can intervene in dangerous or undesirable patterns of communication that will result in better social worlds

Making Videogames

Author: Duncan Harris
Publisher: National Geographic Books
ISBN: 050002314X
Category : Games & Activities
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
An in-depth visual guide presenting the detailed creative journeys behind the development of the world’s leading videogames. Making Videogames is an extraordinary snapshot of modern interactive entertainment, with insight from pioneers about the most important games in the industry. Illustrated with some of the most arresting in-game images ever seen in print, this book explores the unique alchemy of a technical and artistic endeavor striking a captivating balance between insider insight and accessibility. Across twelve chapters, each focusing on a specific game from AAA blockbusters such as Control and Half-Life: Alyx to cult breakthrough games including No Man’s Sky and Return of the Obra Dinn, this volume documents the incredible craft of videogame worldbuilding. These chapters present masterful visual storytelling via the world’s most popular, but seldom fully understood, entertainment medium. Demonstrating the magic and method behind each studio’s work, the book includes enlightening text by Alex Wiltshire complementing specially created imagery “photographed” in-engine by screen capture artist Duncan Harris. A book for die-hard videogame fanatics, aspiring designer-creatives, video game developers, and the visually curious alike, Making Videogames will showcase the boundless creativity of this thrilling industry.

Creating Innovators

Author: Tony Wagner
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1451611498
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 304

Book Description
Reveals the importance of innovation in American global competitiveness, profiling some of today's most compelling young innovators while explaining how they have succeeded through the unconventional methods of parents, teachers, and mentors.

Models and World Making

Author: Annabel Jane Wharton
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
ISBN: 0813947006
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 168

Book Description
From climate change forecasts and pandemic maps to Lego sets and Ancestry algorithms, models encompass our world and our lives. In her thought-provoking new book, Annabel Wharton begins with a definition drawn from the quantitative sciences and the philosophy of science but holds that history and critical cultural theory are essential to a fuller understanding of modeling. Considering changes in the medical body model and the architectural model, from the Middle Ages to the twenty-first century, Wharton demonstrates the ways in which all models are historical and political. Examining how cadavers have been described, exhibited, and visually rendered, she highlights the historical dimension of the modified body and its depictions. Analyzing the varied reworkings of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem—including by monumental commanderies of the Knights Templar, Alberti’s Rucellai Tomb in Florence, Franciscans’ olive wood replicas, and video game renderings—she foregrounds the political force of architectural representations. And considering black boxes—instruments whose inputs we control and whose outputs we interpret, but whose inner workings are beyond our comprehension—she surveys the threats posed by such opaque computational models, warning of the dangers that models pose when humans lose control of the means by which they are generated and understood. Engaging and wide-ranging, Models and World Making conjures new ways of seeing and critically evaluating how we make and remake the world in which we live.