Reactivating Elements

Author: Dimitris Papadopoulos
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 1478021675
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 183

Book Description
The contributors to Reactivating Elements examine chemicals as they mix with soil, air, water, and fire to shape Earth's troubled ecologies today. They invoke the elements with all their ambivalences as chemical categories, material substances, social forms, forces and energies, cosmological entities, and epistemic objects. Engaging with the nonlinear historical significance of elemental thought across fields—chemistry, the biosciences, engineering, physics, science and technology studies, the environmental humanities, ecocriticism, and cultural studies—the contributors examine the relationship between chemistry and ecology, probe the logics that render wind as energy, excavate affective histories of ubiquitous substances such as plastics and radioactive elements, and chart the damage wrought by petrochemical industrialization. Throughout, the volume illuminates how elements become entangled with power and control, coloniality, racism, and extractive productivism while exploring alternative paths to environmental destruction. In so doing, it rethinks the relationship between the elements and the elemental, human and more-than-human worlds, today’s damaged ecosystems and other ecologies to come. Contributors. Patrick Bresnihan, Tim Choy, Joseph Dumit, Cori Hayden, Stefan Helmreich, Joseph Masco, Michelle Murphy, Natasha Myers, Dimitris Papadopoulos, María Puig de la Bellacasa, Astrid Schrader, Isabelle Stengers

Reactivating Elements

Author: Dimitris Papadopoulos
Publisher: Elements
ISBN: 9781478013440
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 304

Book Description
The contributors to Reactiving Elements explore how studying elements--as the foundations of the physical and social world--provide a way to imagine alternatives to worldwide environmental destruction.

An Anthropogenic Table of Elements

Author: Timothy Neale
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 1487563590
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 303

Book Description
An Anthropogenic Table of Elements provides a contemporary rethinking of Dmitri Mendeleev’s periodic table of elements, bringing together "elemental" stories to reflect on everyday life in the Anthropocene. Concise and engaging, this book provides stories of scale, toxicity, and temporality that extrapolate on ideas surrounding ethics, politics, and materiality that are fundamental to this contemporary moment. Examining elemental objects and forces, including carbon, mould, cheese, ice, and viruses, the contributors question what elemental forms are still waiting to emerge and what political possibilities of justice and environmental reparation they might usher into the world. Bringing together anthropologists, historians, and media studies scholars, this book tests a range of possible ways to tabulate and narrate the elemental as a way to bring into view fresh discussion on material constitutions and, thereby, new ethical stances, responsibilities, and power relations. In doing so, An Anthropogenic Table of Elements demonstrates through elementality that even the smallest and humblest stories are capable of powerful effects and vast journeys across time and space.

Planetary Justice

Author: Michele Lobo
Publisher: Policy Press
ISBN: 1529235294
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 268

Book Description
Available open access digitally under CC-BY-NC-ND licence. Bringing together interdisciplinary climate change scholarship and grassroots activism, this book considers the possibilities of planetary justice across human difference, generations, species and the concept of life and non-life. Writing amidst bushfires, cyclones, global climate strikes and a global pandemic, contributors from the Earth Unbound Collective share stories from India, Australia, Canada and Scotland. Chapters draw on Indigenous, Black, Southern, ecosocialist and ecofeminist perspectives to call for more radical and interconnected ideas of justice and solidarity. This accessible book features diverse voices that speak with the planet in the face of climate change, biodiversity loss and extinction. It explores the politics and practices of working towards a future where the planet thrives.

Homologous Recombination and Gene Silencing in Plants

Author: J. Paszkowski
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 9401110948
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 389

Book Description
Higher eukaryotes are characterized by the allocation of distinct functions to numerous types of differentiated cells. Whereas in animals the well-defined, protected cells of the germ line separate early, germ cells in plants differentiate from somatic cells only after many cycles of mitotic division. Therefore somatic mutations in plants can be transmitted via the germ cells to the progeny. There is thus a clear need for somatic tissues to maintain their genetic integrity in the face of environmental challenges, and two types of interactions have been shown to play important roles in the conservation as well as flexibility of plant genomes: homologous recombination of repeated sequences and silencing of multiplied genes. Sensitive methods have been developed that allow greater insights into the dynamics of the genome. This book summarizes current knowledge and working hypotheses about the frequencies and mechanisms of mitochondrial, plastid, nuclear and viral recombination and the inactivation of repeated genes in plants. Despite rapid developments in the field, it is often not possible to provide final answers. Thus, it is an additional task of this book to define the open questions and future challenges. The book is addressed to scientists working on plant biology and recombination, to newcomers in the field and to advanced biology students.

Carbon

Author: Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1509559213
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 228

Book Description
Carbon is much more than a chemical element: it is a polymorphic entity with many faces, at once natural, cultural and social. Ranging across ten million different compounds, carbon has as many personas in nature as it has roles in human life on earth. And yet it rarely makes the headlines as anything other than the villain of our fossil-based economy, feeding an addiction which is driving dangerous levels of consumption and international conflict and which, left unchecked, could lead to our demise as a species. But the impact of CO2 on climate change only tells part of the story, and to demonize carbon as an element which will bring about the downfall of humanity is to reduce it to a pale shadow of itself. In this major new history of carbon, Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent and Sacha Loeve show that this omnipresent element is at the root of countless histories and adventures through time, thanks to its extraordinary versatility. Carbon has a long and prestigious CV: its work and achievements extend far beyond the burning of fossil fuels. The fourth most abundant element in the universe and the second most abundant element in the human body, carbon is the chemical basis of all known life. Carbon chemistry has a long history, with applications ranging from jewellery to heating, underpinning developments in metallurgy, textiles, pharmaceuticals, electronics, nanoscience and green technologies. A biography of carbon transgresses the boundaries between chemical and social existence, between nature and culture, forcing us to abandon the simplified image of carbon as the anti-hero of human civilization and enabling us to see instead the great diversity of carbon’s modes of existence. With scientific precision and literary flair, Bensaude-Vincent and Loeve unravel the surprising ways in which carbon has shaped our world, showing how unrecognizable the earth would be without it. Uncovering the many hidden lives of carbon allows us to view our own with fresh eyes.

Healing the Mind through the Power of Story

Author: Lewis Mehl-Madrona
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1591439701
Category : Health & Fitness
Languages : en
Pages : 370

Book Description
Psychiatry that recognizes the essential role of community in creating a new story of mental health • Provides a critique of conventional psychiatry and a look at what mental health care could be • Includes stories used in the author’s healing practice that draw from traditional cultures around the world Conventional psychiatry is not working. The pharmaceutical industry promises it has cures for everything that ails us, yet a recent study on antidepressants showed there is no difference of success in prescribed pharmaceuticals from placebos when all FDA-reported trials are considered instead of just the trials published in journals. Up to 80 percent of patients with bipolar depression remain symptomatic despite conventional treatment, and 10 to 20 percent of these patients commit suicide. In Healing the Mind through the Power of Story, Dr. Mehl-Madrona shows what mental health care could be. He explains that within a narrative psychiatry model of mental illness, people are not defective, requiring drugs to “fix” them. What needs “fixing” is the ineffective stories they have internalized and succumbed to about how they should live in the world. Drawing on traditional stories from cultures around the world, Dr. Mehl-Madrona helps his patients re-story their lives. He shows how this innovative approach is actually more compatible with what we are learning about the biology of the brain and genetics than the conventional model of psychiatry. Drawing on wisdom both ancient and new, he demonstrates the power and success of narrative psychiatry to bring forth change and lasting transformation.

Responsibility, Privileged Irresponsibility and Response-ability

Author: Vivienne Bozalek
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3031349962
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 177

Book Description
This book uses the overlapping approaches of political care ethics and feminist posthumanism as a lens to focus on the notions of privileged irresponsibility, responsibility and response-ability within the context of higher education and as it pertains to the issues of colonialism/decolonisation, pandemics and the climate crisis. The book will appeal to scholars in the field of higher education as well as to those in several other fields, such as ecology, gender studies, sociology, philosophy, and political science.

Solarities

Author: Cymene Howe
Publisher: punctum books
ISBN: 1685711146
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 317

Book Description

Applied Process Thought

Author: Mark Dibben
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
ISBN: 3110328402
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 400

Book Description
Concentrating mainly on the process philosophy developed by Alfred North Whitehead, this series of essays brings together some of the newest developments in the application of process thinking to the physical and social sciences. These essays, by established scholars in the field, demonstrate how a wider and deeper understanding of the world can be obtained using process philosophical concepts, how the distortions and blockages inevitably inherent in substantivist talk can be set aside, and how new and fertile lines of research in the sciences can be opened as a result.