This collection offers a set of essays that discuss the new technology of memory from a variety of perspectives that explicitly investigate their impact on the very concept of the social.
An eminent psychologist offers a major new theory of human cognition: movement, not language, is the foundation of thought When we try to think about how we think, we can't help but think of words. Indeed, some have called language the stuff of thought. But pictures are remembered far better than words, and describing faces, scenes, and events defies words. Anytime you take a shortcut or play chess or basketball or rearrange your furniture in your mind, you've done something remarkable: abstract thinking without words. In Mind in Motion, psychologist Barbara Tversky shows that spatial cognition isn't just a peripheral aspect of thought, but its very foundation, enabling us to draw meaning from our bodies and their actions in the world. Our actions in real space get turned into mental actions on thought, often spouting spontaneously from our bodies as gestures. Spatial thinking underlies creating and using maps, assembling furniture, devising football strategies, designing airports, understanding the flow of people, traffic, water, and ideas. Spatial thinking even underlies the structure and meaning of language: why we say we push ideas forward or tear them apart, why we're feeling up or have grown far apart. Like Thinking, Fast and Slow before it, Mind in Motion gives us a new way to think about how--and where--thinking takes place.
One Moment One Memory One Motion is more than a book of poetry. It is a way of life. This book is about how one person made a difference in the life of a child-a child living in abuse, and how this enabled her to keep her soul spiritually safe, and to create a happy and successful life. It is a story of hope and transformation.
This debut collection explores memory, cities, motion. Tung-Hui Hu's tone has some of the swampy wit that recalls Calvino or Michaux: A man swaps bodies with his lover; a mapmaker holds captive a city, which needs his crystal telescope to navigate through streets "unreadable as palm lines"; a car pushed off a cliff in a fit of anger becomes home for a school of fish. Anchored by the sequence "Elegies for self," Hu's poetry brings a quiet sophistication to syntax, diction, and form.
A raw, unsentimental and passionately written memoir about trying to care for a parent with Alzheimer’s When her once-glamorous and witty novelist-mother got Alzheimer's, Eleanor Cooney moved her from her beloved Connecticut home to California in order to care for her. In tense, searing prose, punctuated with the blackest of humor, Cooney documents the slow erosion of her mother's mind, the powerful bond the two shared, and her own descent into drink and despair. But the coping mechanism that finally serves this eloquent writer best is writing, the ability to bring to vivid life the memories her mother is losing. As her mother gropes in the gathering darkness for a grip on the world she once loved, succeeding only in conjuring sad fantasies of places and times with her late husband, Cooney revisits their true past. Death in Slow Motion becomes the mesmerizing story of Eleanor's actual childhood, straight out of the pages of John Cheever; the daring and vibrant mother she remembers; and a time that no longer exists for either of them.
The Archive in Motion explores the current proliferation of the concept of the archive. The concept has expanded into areas beyond the classical archive, to art, philosophy, and new textual and media practices. Simultaneously, these new practices both resist and transform the archival impulse, perhaps creating what one could call a new anarchival condition. Archival concepts and practices have been transformed under the impact of the radical changes in writing and recording technologies that have taken place over the last 150 years, and particularly with the introduction of digital technologies. Film, video, television, sound recording, computers, the Internet and new mobile media seem to have instigated a general storage mania and a proliferation of both public and private archival practices. These technologies not only challenge traditional notions of the permanence and stability of the archival document, but they also introduce a wide range of new questions concerning exactly what it means to store information for future use. This collection of essays by the acclaimed international scholars and curators, Alexander Galloway (New York University), Wolfgang Ernst (Humboldt University), Knut Ove Eliassen (Norwegian University of Science and Technology), Susanne Østby Sæther (Fotogalleriet, Oslo), Trond Lundemo (University of Stockholm), Terje Rasmussen and Kjetil Jakobsen (both University of Oslo), is essential reading for anyone interested in the future of archives and the diversity of archival practices and reflections today. The preface is written by the National Librarian of Norway Vigdis Moe Skarstein and the introduction by the editor Eivind Røssaak(The National Library of Norway).
Cedric J. Robinson offers a new understanding of race in America through his analysis of theater and film of the early twentieth century. He argues that economic, political, and cultural forces present in the eras of silent film and the early "talkies" firmly entrenched limited representations of African Americans. Robinson grounds his study in contexts that illuminate the parallel growth of racial beliefs and capitalism, beginning with Shakespearean England and the development of international trade. He demonstrates how the needs of American commerce determined the construction of successive racial regimes that were publicized in the theater and in motion pictures, particularly through plantation and jungle films. In addition to providing new depth and complexity to the history of black representation, Robinson examines black resistance to these practices. Whereas D. W. Griffith appropriated black minstrelsy and romanticized a national myth of origins, Robinson argues that Oscar Micheaux transcended uplift films to create explicitly political critiques of the American national myth. Robinson's analysis marks a new way of approaching the intellectual, political, and media racism present in the beginnings of American narrative cinema.
How does the need to obtain and deliver health services engender particular (im)mobility forms? And how is mobility experienced and imagined when it is required for healthcare access or delivery? Guided by these questions, Healthcare in Motion explores the dynamic interrelationship between mobility and healthcare, drawing on case studies from across the world and shedding light on the day-to-day practices of patients and professionals.