“Impishly witty and ingeniously irreverent” essays on topics from cell phones to librarians, by the author of The Name of the Rose and Foucault’s Pendulum (The Atlantic Monthly). A cosmopolitan curmudgeon the Los Angeles Times called “the Andy Rooney of academia”—known for both nonfiction and novels that have become blockbuster New York Times bestsellers—Umberto Eco takes readers on “a delightful romp through the absurdities of modern life” (Publishers Weekly) as he journeys around the world and into his own wildly adventurous mind. From the mundane details of getting around on Amtrak or in the back of a cab, to reflections on computer jargon and soccer fans, to more important issues like the effects of mass media and consumer civilization—not to mention the challenges of trying to refrigerate an expensive piece of fish at an English hotel—this renowned writer, semiotician, and philosopher provides “an uncanny combination of the profound and the profane” (San Francisco Chronicle). “Eco entertains with his clever reflections and with his unique persona.” —Kirkus Reviews Translated from the Italian by William Weaver
EURECA-PRO is the global educational core hub and interdisciplinary research and innovation leader in qualitative environmental and social framework development for responsible consumption and production. Through its novel approach, on the one hand, it holistically contributes to the highly topical issue of Sustainable Consumption and Production under the umbrella of Sustainable Development Goal 12, and on the other hand it effectively contributes to the development of the European Higher Education Area complimentary to Sustainable Development Goal 4. In this book readers will find the discussion results among professionals, academics and scientists on responsible consumption and production, regarding the latest advances to achieve a sustainable society. This book contents 5 chapters focused on: Smart and healthy societies, Recycling, reused and longer lasting products, fresh air, clean water, healthy soil and biodiversity, cleaner energy and cutting-edge clean technological innovation, and industry 4.0. This book also intends to show the current and future challenges, and innovative solutions considering the technological, humanistic, educational, economic, social and environmental dimensions of sustainability
Throughout his major works, Leo Tolstoy argues that the central problem of the modern world is its delusional character. We have become delusional about the utility of science, the effects of music, the nature of love and the divine, and the inescapable reality of death. A Prophet of Modern Delusions: Tolstoy’s Critique of Modernity explores Tolstoy’s arguments regarding these delusions. In so doing, it illustrates the continuing relevance of Tolstoy’s writings to those who desire to understand the complexities of modernity and who wish to be roused from deeply entrenched ways of thinking that may be delusional.
All knowledge is always a matter of change, as this book underlines. All knowledge links You and Me to Reality. This process of positioning cognition has become heavily influenced by conversion. Its cultural background is in this book named ‘the New Plural’: a worldview based on combinations of Analog, Digital, AI and Quantum understandings of reality. The New Plural, combined with in-depth observations on the Subject in new forms of knowledge formation, forms the background theme of the book. To understand the Subject as defined in past centuries, like Kant’s so-called ‘split ego’ or Voegelin’s ‘flow’, are outlined together with Husserl’s ‘phenomenology of ego-positions’. Today, one encounters the Subject transformed into a Self with other forms that replace the traditional Subject and its position. The dynamics of the Self are therefore broader than any Selfie can picture. What the book calls ‘the Self in digital culture’ and for what it introduces the name Self-E, is therefore essential for a semiotic observation of all actual patterns and practices of communication. The decentering of the Subject changed human cognition. The book introduces ‘The 3-S Triad’ (composed of the ‘Subject–Self–Self-E’), which has taken the place and functions of the classical Subject and its dynamics. Cognition has assumed a different position in the heart and mind of every human being. At the same time, the influence of ‘The New Plural’ has grown, making digital thought formation the leading pattern and foundation of today’s knowledge. That different view on human identity made knowledge as understanding and its traditional grasping disappear. All fragments of planetary life were subjected to a newly conceived and often digitally anchored fitting. That forms one of the most powerful and global challenges to the human mind. What if we conclude about climate change that our knowledge fits the problems concerned? The book’s final pages outline an epistemological path through such complex zones of knowledge! But its broad and encompassing background question remains, what the concept of change really means when it is challenged to clarify the topic we name climate change.
Zygmunt Bauman was one of the most important social theorists of recent decades. He did major work on the Holocaust, the postmodern and much else, up to fifty-eight books in English on almost as many topics. In this book, Australian sociologist Peter Beilharz, Bauman’s collaborator for thirty years, recounts the details of their relationship, simultaneously charting the changes that have occurred in academic life from the 1980s to today. Friendship was one of the bonds that made Bauman and Beilharz’s intellectual collaboration possible. Though the two were worlds apart in terms of biography and place, their work together was defined by a certain kind of intimacy. Separated by a generation, they collaborated for a generation together. This book follows their story in touching detail while puzzling over Bauman’s rich yet contested legacy.
This book explores the theoretical and practical implications of a global resurgence of populism on educational leadership. Drawing together a wide range of international authors, it examines how socio-cultural and political populist developments affect educational policies, organisations, and administration around the world. The collection addresses the forms and meanings of populism and examines their influence on education systems and institutions. It includes theoretical perspectives and rich examples from Australia, Brazil, Canada, Finland, France, Hungary, Nicaragua, the UK, and the US, exploring the complex influences and effects of populism on education policy, politics, and institutions in these countries. These include attacks on initiatives promoting equity and inclusion, the repression of academic freedom, the erosion of institutional autonomy from partisan political direction, and the suppression of evidence and expertise in policy and curriculum development. With its international and multidisciplinary outlook, this book will be highly relevant reading for researchers, scholars, and students in the fields of educational leadership and administration, higher education, and education policy, as well as those interested in the contemporary manifestations of populism on education.
This book is a genealogical inquiry into the present problem of violence, in the US and internationally, through the lens of curriculum theory. It explores a constellation of problems including war, authoritarianism, post-truth, social disparities, and increasingly onerous surveillance technologies. Arguing that the current problem of violence is neither new, nor aberrant, the author historicises the conditions of possibility that have produced the violence that presently confronts our world. Seemingly disparate issues such as ethnonationalism, authoritarian populism, Christian nationalism, neoliberalism, the proliferation of sophisticated surveillance technologies, and military Keynesianism are traced to historical features such as ‘Ur-Fascism,’ white supremacy, corporate capitalism, religious extremism, propaganda and public relations, institutional power, and the biopolitical ‘death function’ endemic in modern societies. Through a sweeping, powerful, and in-depth analysis of violence in its genealogical trajectories in global setting, it promises to re-examine curriculum in a different light and open up new possibilities. As such, the book is an important curriculum study which supports curricular ethics as articulated by Bill Pinar, such as the situation of the self socially and historically, the reconstruction of one’s understanding of the self and the world, and the potential reconstruction of the social world as more peaceful and just. Significantly, the book contributes to a retheorisation of Foucault’s biopolitics as affirmative biopower imbued with ethics of truth-seeking as a technology of the self. It will appeal to scholars and students of curriculum studies with interests in curriculum theory, authoritarianism, non-violence studies, justice studies, ethnonationalism and technologies of the self.
An annual favourite, the Canterbury Preacher's Companion provides a total of 150 complete sermons for the coming year, with hymn suggestions. For each Sunday of the year there are two sermons based on the Principal and Second Service Lectionaries, plus a section of sermons for special occasions - Mothering Sunday, Harvest, baptism, marriage, funerals - and for all major saints' days. In addition, it offers at-a-glance summaries of the Bible readings, seasonal introductions, a full colour liturgical calendar and hymns suggestions throughout the year. The sermons are complete and ready to use, or can be used as a base for local adaptation. This is an essential companion for hard-pressed clergy and preachers everywhere.