Polity press nov 2021 (16 Ergebnisse)

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - After the harrowing experience of the pandemic and lockdown, both states and individuals have been searching for ways to exit the crisis, many hoping to return as soon as possible to 'the world as it was before the pandemic'. But there is another way to learn the lessons of this ordeal: as inhabitants of the earth, we may not be able to exit lockdown so easily after all, since the global health crisis is embedded in another larger and more serious crisis - that brought about by the New Climate Regime. Learning to live in lockdown might be an opportunity to be seized: a dress-rehearsal for the climate mutation, an opportunity to understand at last where we - inhabitants of the earth - live, what kind of place 'earth' is and how we will be able to orient ourselves and exist in this world in the years to come. We might finally be able to explore the land in which we live, together with all other living beings, begin to understand the true nature of the climate mutation we are living through and discover what kind of freedom is possible - a freedom differently situated and differently understood. In this sequel to his bestselling book Down to Earth, Bruno Latour provides a compass for this necessary re-orientation of our lives, outlining the metaphysics of confinement and deconfinement with which we will all be obliged to come to terms by the strange times in which we are living.…

Buch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - In June 2016, the people of the United Kingdom voted to leave the European Union. As the EU's chief negotiator, for four years Michel Barnier had a seat at the table as the two sides thrashed out what 'Brexit' would really mean. The result would change Britain and Europe forever.During the 1600 days of complex and often acrimonious negotiations, Michel Barnier kept a secret diary. He recorded his private hopes and fears, and gave a blow-by-blow account as the negotiations oscillated between consensus and disagreement, transparency and lies.From Brussels to London, from Dublin to Nicosia, Michel Barnier's secret diary lifts the lid on what really happened behind the scenes of one of the most high-stakes negotiations in modern history. The result is a unique testimony from the ultimate insider on the hidden world of Brexit and those who made it happen.…

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - What is Latin American History surveys the development of this vibrant and dynamic field of study in North America, Latin America, and Europe. After briefly sketching the growth of the topic up to the 1960s, Marshall Eakin focuses on the past half-century, from the dominance of social history to the cultural turn. He surveys innovative work on topics including slavery, indigenous peoples, race, the environment, science, medicine, and gender, and ends with a discussion of the emergence of the concepts of borderlands, the Atlantic world, and transnational history - that both enrich and challenge the very idea of Latin America.This concise volume offers the first broad overview of Latin American history and historiography for students, scholars, and the general reader, outlining the key social, cultural, and political forces that have shaped both Latin America and its study.…

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - Michael Burawoy has helped to reshape the theory and practice of sociology across the Western world. Public Sociology is his most thoroughgoing attempt to explore what a truly committed, engaged sociology should look like in the twenty-first century.Burawoy looks back on the defining moments of his intellectual journey, exploring his pivotal early experiences as a researcher, such as his fieldwork in a Zambian copper mine and a Chicago factory. He recounts his time as a graduate and professor during the ideological ferment in sociology departments of the 1970s, and explores how his experiences intersected with a changing political and intellectual world up to the present. Recalling Max Weber, Burawoy argues that sociology is much more than just a discipline - it is a vocation, to be practiced everywhere and by everyone.…

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - The digital revolution has not only transformed multiple aspects of social life - it also shakes sociological theory, transforming the most basic assumptions that have underlain it. In this timely book, Ori Schwarz explores the main challenges digitalization poses to different strands of sociological theory and offers paths to adapt them to new social realities.What would symbolic interactionism look like in a world where interaction no longer takes place within bounded situations and is constantly documented as durable digital objects How should we understand new digitally mediated forms of human association that bind our actions and lives together but have little in common with old-time 'collectives'; and why are they not simply 'social networks' How does social capital transform when it is materialized in a digital form, and how does it remould power structures What happens to our conceptualization of power when faced with the emergence of new forms of algorithmic power And what happens when labour departs from work By posing and answering such fascinating questions, and offering critical tools for both students and scholars of social theory and digital society to engage with them, this thought-provoking book draws the outline of future sociological theory for our digital society.…

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - Certain philosophers of Antiquity compared the world to a large animal; but if the world were an animal, it would have a skin similar to the skin that envelops each living being and gives it unity. The world is neither an animal nor a machine but an interminable jumble whose destination is nothing other than the maelstrom in which the very idea of the world slips away. The world has no skin other than the turbulence that makes histories, customs, moments of grandeur and decadence. Because it is not a skin, this extension of space-time is much more fragile than the skins that are already always fragile, because everything here touches its extremities.The world is everything that passes between us - ourselves and everything that happens to us, everything that becomes of our contacts, our gazes, our movements; and through referrals from skin to skin, from the fleeting to the immemorial, you reach, without even knowing it, the entire actuality of the world: the act of its existence. This act is made up of works and disasters, splendours, horrors, and catastrophes. As long as it is ours, it is the act of an infinite emergence that is all the sense there is: a sense that incessantly goes from skin to skin and is itself never enveloped by anything.The texts in this volume are all oriented by the concern for what is currently happening to us - we, late humanoids - when we arrive at an extremity of our history, whether this extremity should turn out to be a stage, a rupture, or quite simply a last breath.…

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - The world is in the midst of a storm that has shaped the history of modernity along a double fracture: on the one hand, an environmental fracture driven by a technocratic and capitalist civilization that led to the ongoing devastation of the Earth's ecosystems and its human and non-human communities and, on the other, a colonial fracture instilled by Western colonization and imperialism that resulted in racial slavery and the domination of indigenous peoples and women in particular. In this important new book, Malcom Ferdinand challenges this double fracture, thinking from the Caribbean world. Here, the slave ship reveals the inequalities that continue during the storm: some are shackled inside the hold and even thrown overboard at the first gusts of wind. Drawing on empirical and theoretical work in the Caribbean, Ferdinand conceptualizes a decolonial ecology that holds protecting the environment together with the political struggles against (post)colonial domination, structural racism, and misogynistic practices. Facing the storm, this book is an invitation to build a world-ship where humans and non-humans can live together on a bridge of justice and shape a common world. It will be of great interest to students and scholars in environmental humanities and Latin American and Caribbean studies, as well as anyone interested in ecology, slavery, and (de)colonization.…

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - If we didn't possess certain beliefs about such things as time, appearance and reality, and how effect follows cause, we wouldn't be able to get out of bed in the morning, let alone read a book about metaphysics, which is the study of our experience and those ideas, or presuppositions, which allow us to make sense of it.Drawing on examples from art, science, and daily life, John Heil shows how metaphysics begins in questioning our everyday assumptions about how the world 'works' and ends with speculation on the nature of the universe itself. In chapters that cover the major topics in the academic study of metaphysics, from free will and consciousness to time and objectivity, Heil explains how metaphysical questions underpin everything human beings do.This accessible book will show you how professional philosophers try to categorize and make sense of our world of perception and experience and explains why everyone should take metaphysics seriously.…

Buch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - We were drowning in in record levels of debt before the COVID-19 crisis, and we are now deluged in it. U.S. private-sector loans have tripled relative to income since 1950 - and government debt is also at an all-time high. Soaring debt burdens individuals, stifles growth, compounds inequality, and brings falling living standards for millions.Richard Vague's new book argues that, contrary to mainstream assumptions, we cannot simply hope that the trend will correct itself. Mounting debt is a feature of our economic system, not a bug: debts perpetually grow and compound, polarizing and impoverishing economies if not overtly dealt with. He offers a detailed plan for how we can restructure a range of debts - such as student loans, auto loans, medical debt and more - and offer hard-pressed debtors a 'jubilee' now, not in some utopian future.Vague's bold polemic contains a wealth of ideas that will free millions from modern-day debt peonage, reduce inequality and bring new vigor to the economy as it struggles to emerge from the pandemic.…

Buch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - After the harrowing experience of the pandemic and lockdown, both states and individuals have been searching for ways to exit the crisis, many hoping to return as soon as possible to 'the world as it was before the pandemic'. But there is another way to learn the lessons of this ordeal: as inhabitants of the earth, we may not be able to exit lockdown so easily after all, since the global health crisis is embedded in another larger and more serious crisis - that brought about by the New Climate Regime. Learning to live in lockdown might be an opportunity to be seized: a dress-rehearsal for the climate mutation, an opportunity to understand at last where we - inhabitants of the earth - live, what kind of place 'earth' is and how we will be able to orient ourselves and exist in this world in the years to come. We might finally be able to explore the land in which we live, together with all other living beings, begin to understand the true nature of the climate mutation we are living through and discover what kind of freedom is possible - a freedom differently situated and differently understood. In this sequel to his bestselling book Down to Earth, Bruno Latour provides a compass for this necessary re-orientation of our lives, outlining the metaphysics of confinement and deconfinement with which we will all be obliged to come to terms by the strange times in which we are living.…

Buch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - The digital revolution has not only transformed multiple aspects of social life - it also shakes sociological theory, transforming the most basic assumptions that have underlain it. In this timely book, Ori Schwarz explores the main challenges digitalization poses to different strands of sociological theory and offers paths to adapt them to new social realities.What would symbolic interactionism look like in a world where interaction no longer takes place within bounded situations and is constantly documented as durable digital objects How should we understand new digitally mediated forms of human association that bind our actions and lives together but have little in common with old-time 'collectives'; and why are they not simply 'social networks' How does social capital transform when it is materialized in a digital form, and how does it remould power structures What happens to our conceptualization of power when faced with the emergence of new forms of algorithmic power And what happens when labour departs from work By posing and answering such fascinating questions, and offering critical tools for both students and scholars of social theory and digital society to engage with them, this thought-provoking book draws the outline of future sociological theory for our digital society.…

Buch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - In the first days of spring, birds undergo a spectacular metamorphosis. After a long winter of migration and peaceful coexistence, they suddenly begin to sing with all their might, varying each series of notes as if it were an audiophonic novel. They cannot bear the presence of other birds and begin to threaten and attack them if they cross a border, which might be invisible to human eyes but seems perfectly tangible to birds. Is this display of bird aggression just a pretence, a game that all birds play Or do birds suddenly become territorial - and, if so, why By attending carefully to the ways that birds construct their worlds and ornithologists have tried to understand them, Despret sheds fresh light on the activities of both and, at the same time, enables us to become more aware of the multiple worlds and modes of existence that characterize the planet we share in common with birds and other species.…

Buch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - A war's outcome is determined by more than bullets and bombs. In our digital age, the proliferation of new media venues has magnified the importance of information - whether its content is true or purposely false - in battling an enemy and defending the public.In this book, Philip Seib, one of the world's leading experts on media and war, offers a probing analysis of the role of information in warfare from the Second World War to the present day and beyond. He focuses on some of the thorniest issues on the contemporary agenda: When untruthful and inflammatory information poisons a nation's political processes and weakens its social fabric, what kind of response is appropriate How can media literacy help citizens defend themselves against information warfare Should militaries place greater emphasis on crippling their adversaries with information rather than kinetic force Well-written and wide-ranging, Information at War suggests answers to key questions with which governments, journalists, and the public must grapple during the years ahead. Information at war affects us all, and this book shows us how.…

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware -Certain philosophers of Antiquity compared the world to a large animal; but if the world were an animal, it would have a skin similar to the skin that envelops each living being and gives it unity. The world is neither an animal nor a machine but an interminable jumble whose destination is nothing other than the maelstrom in which the very idea of the world slips away. The world has no skin other than the turbulence that makes histories, customs, moments of grandeur and decadence. Because it is not a skin, this extension of space-time is much more fragile than the skins that are already always fragile, because everything here touches its extremities. The world is everything that passes between us - ourselves and everything that happens to us, everything that becomes of our contacts, our gazes, our movements; and through referrals from skin to skin, from the fleeting to the immemorial, you reach, without even knowing it, the entire actuality of the world: the act of its existence. This act is made up of works and disasters, splendours, horrors, and catastrophes. As long as it is ours, it is the act of an infinite emergence that is all the sense there is: a sense that incessantly goes from skin to skin and is itself never enveloped by anything. The texts in this volume are all oriented by the concern for what is currently happening to us - we, late humanoids - when we arrive at an extremity of our history, whether this extremity should turn out to be a stage, a rupture, or quite simply a last breath. 140 pp. Englisch.…

Buch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - One of the most persistent concerns about the future is whether it will be dominated by the predictive algorithms of AI - and, if so, what this will mean for our behaviour, for our institutions and for what it means to be human. AI changes our experience of time and the future and challenges our identities, yet we are blinded by its efficiency and fail to understand how it affects us.At the heart of our trust in AI lies a paradox: we leverage AI to increase our control over the future and uncertainty, while at the same time the performativity of AI, the power it has to make us act in the ways it predicts, reduces our agency over the future. This happens when we forget that that we humans have created the digital technologies to which we attribute agency. These developments also challenge the narrative of progress, which played such a central role in modernity and is based on the hubris of total control. We are now moving into an era where this control is limited as AI monitors our actions, posing the threat of surveillance, but also offering the opportunity to reappropriate control and transform it into care.As we try to adjust to a world in which algorithms, robots and avatars play an ever-increasing role, we need to understand better the limitations of AI and how their predictions affect our agency, while at the same time having the courage to embrace the uncertainty of the future.…

Buch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - For the majority of Americans, hard times have long been a way of life. Some work multiple low-wage jobs, others face the squeeze of stagnant wages and rising costs of living. Sociologist Celine-Marie Pascale talked with people across Appalachia, at the Standing Rock and Wind River reservations, and in the bustling city of Oakland, California. Their voices offer a wide range of experiences that complicate dominant national narratives about economic struggles.Yet Living on the Edge is about more than individual experiences. It's about a nation in a deep economic and moral crisis. It's about the long-standing collusion between government and corporations that prioritizes profits over people, over the environment, and over the nation's well-being. It's about how racism, sexism, violence, and the pandemic shape daily experience in struggling communities. And, ultimately, it's a book about hope that lays out a vision for the future as honest as it is ambitious.Most people in the book are not progressives; none are radicals. They're hard-working people who know from experience that the current system is unsustainable. Across the country people described the need for a living wage, accessible health care, immigration reform, and free education. Their voices are worth listening to.…