Author: Deborah Cowen Publisher: U of Minnesota Press ISBN: 1452943192 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 312
Book Description
In a world in which global trade is at risk, where warehouses and airports, shipping lanes and seaports try to guard against the likes of Al Qaeda and Somali pirates, and natural disaster can disrupt the flow of goods, even our “stuff” has a political life. The high stakes of logistics are not surprising, Deborah Cowen reveals, if we understand its genesis in war. In The Deadly Life of Logistics, Cowen traces the art and science of logistics over the last sixty years, from the battlefield to the boardroom and back again. Focusing on choke points such as national borders, zones of piracy, blockades, and cities, she tracks contemporary efforts to keep goods circulating and brings to light the collective violence these efforts produce. She investigates how the old military art of logistics played a critical role in the making of the global economic order—not simply the globalization of production, but the invention of the supply chain and the reorganization of national economies into transnational systems. While reshaping the world of production and distribution, logistics is also actively reconfiguring global maps of security and citizenship, a phenomenon Cowen charts through the rise of supply chain security, with its challenge to long-standing notions of state sovereignty and border management. Though the object of corporate and governmental logistical efforts is commodity supply, The Deadly Life of Logistics demonstrates that they are deeply political—and, considered in the context of the long history of logistics, deeply indebted to the practice of war.
Author: Jesse LeCavalier Publisher: U of Minnesota Press ISBN: 1452951535 Category : Architecture Languages : en Pages : 389
Book Description
Every time you wheel a shopping cart through one of Walmart’s more than 10,000 stores worldwide, or swipe your credit card or purchase something online, you enter a mind-boggling logistical regime. Even if you’ve never shopped at Walmart, its logistics have probably affected your life. The Rule of Logistics makes sense of its spatial and architectural ramifications by analyzing the stores, distribution centers, databases, and inventory practices of the world’s largest corporation. The Rule of Logistics tells the story of Walmart’s buildings in the context of the corporation’s entire operation, itself characterized by an obsession with logistics. Beginning with the company’s founding in 1962, Jesse LeCavalier reveals how logistics—as a branch of knowledge, an area of work, and a collection of processes—takes shape and changes our built environment. Weaving together archival material with original drawings, LeCavalier shows how a diverse array of ideas, people, and things—military theory and chewing gum, Howard Dean and satellite networks, Hudson River School painters and real estate software, to name a few—are all connected through Walmart’s logistical operations and in turn are transforming how its buildings are conceptualized, located, built, and inhabited. A major new contribution to architectural history and theory, The Rule of Logistics helps us understand how retailing today is changing our bodies, brains, buildings, and cities and predicts what future forms architecture might take when shaped by systems that exceed its current capacities.
Author: Deborah Cowen Publisher: University of Toronto Press ISBN: 0802092330 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 337
Book Description
Despite the centrality of war in social and political thought, the military remains marginal in academic and public conceptions of citizenship, and the soldier seems to be thought of as a peripheral or even exceptional player. Military Workfare draws on five decades of restricted archival material and critical theories on war and politics to examine how a military model of work, discipline, domestic space, and the social self has redefined citizenship in the wake of the Second World War. It is also a study of the complex, often concealed ways in which organized violence continues to shape national belonging. What does the military have to do with welfare? Could war-work be at the centre of social rights in both historic and contemporary contexts? Deborah Cowen undertakes such important questions with the citizenship of the soldier front and centre in the debate. Connecting global geopolitics to intimate struggles over entitlement and identity at home, she challenges our assumptions about the national geographies of citizenship, proposing that the soldier has, in fact, long been the model citizen of the social state. Paying particular attention to the rise of neoliberalism and the emergence of civilian workfare, Military Workfare looks to the institution of the military to unsettle established ideas about the past and raise new questions about our collective future.
Author: Kent Brantly Publisher: WaterBrook ISBN: 1601428251 Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 242
Book Description
The story of Dr. Kent and Amber Brantly's call to serve their neighbors, as well as Kent's fight for life against Ebola, and Amber's struggle to support him from half a world away. Dr. Brantly reminds readers of the risk, honor, and joy to be known when God and others are served without reservation.
Author: Laleh Khalili Publisher: Verso Books ISBN: 1786634813 Category : Political Science Languages : en Pages : 369
Book Description
How shipping is central to the very fabric of global capitalism In our networked world, the realities governing the international movement of freight are easily forgotten. But maritime transport remains the bedrock of trade. Convoys perpetually crisscross the oceans, carrying gas, oil, ore – indeed, every type of consumable and commodity. These movements, though practically invisible, mean that control of the seas is vital in an age when no nation can survive on domestic products alone. Professor and author Laleh Khalili travelled the Mediterranean, the Red Sea, and the Indian Ocean aboard gigantic container ships to investigate the secretive and sometimes dangerous world of maritime trade. What she discovered was strangely disturbing: brutally exploited seafarers enduring loneliness and risking injury to keep the cogs of trade turning. In the Arabian peninsula’s ports, forbidden places encircled by barbed wire and moats of highways, the dockers struggle for benefits and political rights, as they have for generations. Environmental catastrophes threaten with increasing intensity and frequency. Around the oil-trading nations of the Middle East, a history of British colonialism, modern US imperialism, and local autocracies combine to worsen the conditions of modern seafarers, and piracy persists near the Horn of Africa. From her research riding the sea lanes and visiting the major Middle Eastern ports, Khalili has produced a book that exposes the frayed and tense sinews of modern capital, a physical network without which none of our more abstracted webs and systems could operate.
Author: Angela Carstensen Publisher: American Library Association ISBN: 083899315X Category : Language Arts & Disciplines Languages : en Pages : 175
Book Description
More than simply a vital collection development tool, this book can help librarians help young adults grow into the kind of independent readers and thinkers who will flourish at college.
Author: Bonnie Nardi Publisher: University of Michigan Press ISBN: 0472026712 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 250
Book Description
"Ever since the creators of the animated television show South Park turned their lovingly sardonic gaze on the massively multiplayer online game World of Warcraft for an entire episode, WoW's status as an icon of digital culture has been secure. My Life as a Night Elf Priest digs deep beneath the surface of that icon to explore the rich particulars of the World of Warcraft player's experience." —Julian Dibbell, Wired "World of Warcraft is the best representative of a significant new technology, art form, and sector of society: the theme-oriented virtual world. Bonnie Nardi's pioneering transnational ethnography explores this game both sensitively and systematically using the methods of cultural anthropology and aesthetics with intensive personal experience as a guild member, media teacher, and magical quest Elf." —William Sims Bainbridge, author of The Warcraft Civilization and editor of Online Worlds “Nardi skillfully covers all of the hot button issues that come to mind when people think of video games like World of Warcraft such as game addiction, sexism, and violence. What gives this book its value are its unexpected gems of rare and beautifully detailed research on less sensationalized topics of interest such as the World of Warcraft player community in China, game modding, the increasingly blurred line between play and work, and the rich and fascinating lives of players and player cultures. Nardi brings World of Warcraft down to earth for non-players and ties it to social and cultural theory for scholars. . . . the best ethnography of a single virtual world produced so far.” —Lisa Nakamura, University of Illinois World of Warcraft rapidly became one of the most popular online world games on the planet, amassing 11.5 million subscribers—officially making it an online community of gamers that had more inhabitants than the state of Ohio and was almost twice as populous as Scotland. It's a massively multiplayer online game, or MMO in gamer jargon, where each person controls a single character inside a virtual world, interacting with other people's characters and computer-controlled monsters, quest-givers, and merchants. In My Life as a Night Elf Priest, Bonnie Nardi, a well-known ethnographer who has published extensively on how theories of what we do intersect with how we adopt and use technology, compiles more than three years of participatory research in Warcraft play and culture in the United States and China into this field study of player behavior and activity. She introduces us to her research strategy and the history, structure, and culture of Warcraft; argues for applying activity theory and theories of aesthetic experience to the study of gaming and play; and educates us on issues of gender, culture, and addiction as part of the play experience. Nardi paints a compelling portrait of what drives online gamers both in this country and in China, where she spent a month studying players in Internet cafes. Bonnie Nardi has given us a fresh look not only at World of Warcraft but at the field of game studies as a whole. One of the first in-depth studies of a game that has become an icon of digital culture, My Life as a Night Elf Priest will capture the interest of both the gamer and the ethnographer. Bonnie A. Nardi is an anthropologist by training and a professor in the Department of Informatics in the Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences at the University of California, Irvine. Her research focus is the social implications of digital technologies. She is the author of A Small Matter of Programming: Perspectives on End User Computing and the coauthor of Information Ecologies: Using Technology with Heart and Acting with Technology: Activity Theory and Interaction Design. Cover art by Jessica Damsky
Author: Robin Wasserman Publisher: Ember ISBN: 0375872779 Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 466
Book Description
While working on a project translating letters from sixteenth-century Prague, high school senior Nora Kane discovers her best friend murdered with her boyfriend the apparent killer and is caught up in a dangerous web of secret societies and shadowy conspirators, all searching for a mysterious ancient device purported to allow direct communication with God.
Author: Tim Vigors Publisher: Grub Street Publishers ISBN: 1908117834 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 280
Book Description
A newly discovered “exhilarating and moving memoir” of an RAF fighter pilot in World War II (Daily Mail). It is not often that a long-hidden gem of a manuscript is published, bringing a moment in WWII history to vivid life for today’s readers. Geoffrey Wellum’s First Light was one example. The memoir of Timothy Vigors is another. Born in Hatfield but raised in Ireland and educated at Eton and Cranwell, Vigors found himself in France in 1940 flying Fairey Battle bombers. After the Fall he joined the fighters of 222 Squadron, with whom he saw frantic and distinguished service over Dunkirk and persevered through the dangerous days of the Battle of Britain, when he became an ace. Vigors transferred to the Far East in January 1941 as a flight commander with 243, then to 453 Squadron RAAF, and on December 10 of that year he led a flight of Buffaloes to cover the sinking Prince of Wales and Repulse. Dramatically shot down, burnt and attacked on his parachute, he was evacuated to Java, and from there, to India. As he describes these experiences in his handwritten account, the author provides a fascinating and valuable record, a newly discovered personal narrative of air combat destined to be seen as a classic.
Author: Deborah Cowen Publisher: UBC Press ISBN: 0774862408 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 309
Book Description
Digital technologies have changed the world, transforming how, where, and when we communicate, love, learn, create, produce, distribute, and consume. Digital Lives in the Global City examines the entanglements of urban life, investigating how urban land, governance, and the economy are being remade by advancing communication technologies. Digital infrastructures connect people and places across vast distances, yet they also extend the working day into personal time and space, increase the power of financial institutions, and enhance state and corporate surveillance capacities. Digital Lives in the Global City intersperses critical scholarship with provocative short works from artists, activists, and citizens to engage with a wide range of issues wrought by digital infrastructure: struggles over unsafe and illegal buildings in Mumbai, the conditions of migrant work in Singapore, the question of digital debt in Toronto, and targeted policing in New York. This nuanced exploration reveals the profound connections between digital technologies and the social life of global cities.
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Author: Deborah Cowen
Author: Jesse LeCavalier
Author: Deborah Cowen
Author: Kent Brantly
Author: Laleh Khalili
Author: Angela Carstensen
Author: Bonnie Nardi
Author: Robin Wasserman
Author: Tim Vigors
Author: Deborah Cowen