Data Selves

Author: Deborah Lupton
Publisher: Polity
ISBN: 9781509536429
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 80

Book Description
As people use self-tracking devices and other digital technologies, they generate increasing quantities of personal information online. These data have many benefits, but they can also be accessed and exploited by third parties. In Data Selves, Deborah Lupton develops a fresh and intriguing perspective on how people make sense of and use their personal data, and what they know about others who use this information. Drawing on feminist new materialism theory and the anthropology of material culture, she acknowledges the importance of paying attention to practices, affects, sensory and other embodied experiences, as well as discourses, imaginaries and ideas in identifying the ways in which people make and enact data, and data make and enact people. Arguing that personal data are more-than-human phenomena, invested with diverse forms of vitalities, Lupton reveals significant implications for data futures, politics and ethics. Using rich examples from popular culture and empirical research, this book illustrates the power of data imaginaries, materializations and affects. Lupton's novel approach to understanding personal data will be of interest to students and scholars in media and cultural studies, sociology, anthropology, surveillance studies, and science and technology studies.

Digital Sociology

Author: Noortje Marres
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 0745684823
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 203

Book Description
This provocative new introduction to the field of digital sociology offers a critical overview of interdisciplinary debates about new ways of knowing society that are emerging today at the interface of computing, media, social research and social life. Digital Sociology introduces key concepts, methods and understandings that currently inform the development of specifically digital forms of social enquiry. Marres assesses the relevance and usefulness of digital methods, data and techniques for the study of sociological phenomena and evaluates the major claim that computation makes possible a new ‘science of society’. As Marres argues, the digital does much more than inspire innovation in social research: it forces us to engage anew with fundamental sociological questions. We must learn to appreciate that the digital has the capacity to throw into crisis existing knowledge frameworks and is likely to reconfigure wider relations. This timely engagement with a key transformation of our age will be indispensable reading for undergraduate and graduate students taking courses in digital sociology, digital media, computing and society.

Indigenous Peoples and Colonialism

Author: Colin Samson
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1509514570
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 233

Book Description
Indigenous peoples have gained increasing international visibility in their fight against longstanding colonial occupation by nation-states. Although living in different locations around the world and practising highly varied ways of life, indigenous peoples nonetheless are affected by similar patterns of colonial dispossession and violence. In defending their collective rights to self-determination, culture, lands and resources, their resistance and creativity offer a pause for critical reflection on the importance of maintaining indigenous distinctiveness against the homogenizing forces of states and corporations. This timely book highlights significant colonial patterns of domination and their effects, as well as responses and resistance to colonialism. It brings indigenous peoples issues and voices to the forefront of sociological discussions of modernity. In particular, the book examines issues of identity, dispossession, environment, rights and revitalization in relation to historical and ongoing colonialism, showing that the experiences of indigenous peoples in wealthy and poor countries are often parallel and related. With a strong comparative scope and interdisciplinary perspective, the book is an essential introductory reading for students interested in race and ethnicity, human rights, development and indigenous peoples issues in an interconnected world.

Axel Honneth

Author: Christopher Zurn
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 0745686788
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 240

Book Description
With his insightful and wide-ranging theory of recognition, AxelHonneth has decisively reshaped the Frankfurt School tradition ofcritical social theory. Combining insights from philosophy,sociology, psychology, history, political economy, and culturalcritique, Honneth’s work proposes nothing less than anaccount of the moral infrastructure of human sociality and itsrelation to the perils and promise of contemporary sociallife. This book provides an accessible overview of Honneth’s maincontributions across a variety of fields, assessing the strengthsand weaknesses of his thought. Christopher Zurn clearly explainsHonneth’s multi-faceted theory of recognition and itsrelation to diverse topics: individual identity, morality, activistmovements, progress, social pathologies, capitalism, justice,freedom, and critique. In so doing, he places Honneth’stheory in a broad intellectual context, encompassing classic socialtheorists such as Kant, Hegel, Marx, Freud, Dewey, Adorno andHabermas, as well as contemporary trends in social theory andpolitical philosophy. Treating the full range of Honneth’scorpus, including his major new work on social freedom anddemocratic ethical life, this book is the most up-to-date guideavailable. Axel Honneth will be invaluable to students and scholarsworking across the humanities and social sciences, as well asanyone seeking a clear guide to the work of one of the mostinfluential theorists writing today.

The Metamorphosis of the World

Author: Ulrich Beck
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 0745690254
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 240

Book Description
We live in a world that is increasingly difficult to understand. It is not just changing: it is metamorphosing. Change implies that some things change but other things remain the same capitalism changes, but some aspects of capitalism remain as they always were. Metamorphosis implies a much more radical transformation in which the old certainties of modern society are falling away and something quite new is emerging. To grasp this metamorphosis of the world it is necessary to explore the new beginnings, to focus on what is emerging from the old and seek to grasp future structures and norms in the turmoil of the present. Take climate change: much of the debate about climate change has focused on whether or not it is really happening, and if it is, what we can do to stop or contain it. But this emphasis on solutions blinds us to the fact that climate change is an agent of metamorphosis. It has already altered our way of being in the world the way we live in the world, think about the world and seek to act upon the world through our actions and politics. Rising sea levels are creating new landscapes of inequality drawing new world maps whose key lines are not traditional boundaries between nation-states but elevations above sea level. It is creating an entirely different way of conceptualizing the world and our chances of survival within it. The theory of metamorphosis goes beyond theory of world risk society: it is not about the negative side effects of goods but the positive side effects of bads. They produce normative horizons of common goods and propel us beyond the national frame towards a cosmopolitan outlook.

Suffering

Author: Iain Wilkinson
Publisher: Polity
ISBN: 0745631975
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 200

Book Description
Providing a clear and thoughtful discussion of human suffering, Ian Wilkinson explores some of the ways in which research into social suffering might lead us to reinterpret the meaning of modern history as well as revise our outlook upon the possible futures that await us.

Why Are There Still Creationists?

Author: Jonathan Marks
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1509547487
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 112

Book Description
The evidence for the ancestry of the human species among the apes is overwhelming. But the facts are never “just” facts. Human evolution has always been a value-laden scientific theory and, as anthropology makes clear, the ancestors are always sacred. They may be ghosts, or corpses, or fossils, or a naked couple in a garden, but the idea that you are part of a lineage is a powerful and universal one. Meaning and morals are at play, which most certainly transcend science and its quest for maximum accuracy. With clarity and wit, Jonathan Marks shows that the creation/evolution debate is not science versus religion. After all, modern anti-evolutionists reject humanistic scholarship about the Bible even more fundamentally than they reject the science of our simian ancestry. Widening horizons on both sides of the debate, Marks makes clear that creationism is a theological, not a scientific, debate and that thinking perceptively about values and meanings should not be an alternative to thinking about science – it should be a key part of it.

Seduction

Author: Rachel O'Neill
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1509521593
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 232

Book Description
Within the so-called seduction community, the ability to meet and attract women is understood as a skill which heterosexual men can cultivate through practical training and personal development. Though it has been an object of media speculation – and frequent sensationalism – for over a decade, this cultural formation remains poorly understood. In the first book-length study of the industry, Rachel O’Neill takes us into the world of seduction seminars, training events, instructional guidebooks and video tutorials. Pushing past established understandings of ‘pickup artists’ as pathetic, pathological or perverse, she examines what makes seduction so compelling for those drawn to participate in this sphere. Seduction vividly portrays how the twin rationalities of neoliberalism and postfeminism are reorganising contemporary intimate life, as labour-intensive and profit-orientated modes of sociality consume other forms of being and relating. It is essential reading for students and scholars of gender, sexuality, sociology and cultural studies, as well as anyone who wants to understand the seduction industry’s overarching logics and internal workings.

Harvey Sacks

Author: David Silverman
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0195214730
Category : Conversation analysis
Languages : en
Pages : 238

Book Description
Although he published relatively little in his lifetime, Harvey Sacks's lectures and papers were influential in sociology and sociolinguistics and played a major role in the development of ethnomethodology and conversation analysis. The recent publication of Sacks's "Lectures on Conversation" has provided an opportunity for a wide-ranging reassessment of his contribution.

Digital Humanities

Author: David M. Berry
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 0745697690
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 176

Book Description
As the twenty-first century unfolds, computers challenge the way in which we think about culture, society and what it is to be human: areas traditionally explored by the humanities. In a world of automation, Big Data, algorithms, Google searches, digital archives, real-time streams and social networks, our use of culture has been changing dramatically. The digital humanities give us powerful theories, methods and tools for exploring new ways of being in a digital age. Berry and Fagerjord provide a compelling guide, exploring the history, intellectual work, key arguments and ideas of this emerging discipline. They also offer an important critique, suggesting ways in which the humanities can be enriched through computing, but also how cultural critique can transform the digital humanities. Digital Humanities will be an essential book for students and researchers in this new field but also related areas, such as media and communications, digital media, sociology, informatics, and the humanities more broadly.