This book explores the ‘material-discursive entanglement’ of how we both make the world with our words and how the materiality of the world forces us to put words on it. Beginning with the conundrum of how the things that make up our world are both shaped by and shape the ways in which we talk about, engage with and think about them, the author accepts the entanglement and then works backwards, using the metaphor of refraction to help articulate the structures, values and norms that discursively shape our world and our selves in it. Through a series of empirical examples taken from work on medical technologies and the body, Refracting through Technologies shows how researchers and designers can use material things – technologies – to refract discourses and articulate the concerns and voices producing them. Refraction as a metaphor is thus revealed to be an important concept, enabling scholars to apply analytical work to political concerns about the technological world. As such, it will appeal to scholars of sociology, science and technology studies, philosophy and design with interests in technoscience, feminist thought and social theory.
This book explores the 'material-discursive entanglement' of how we both make the world with our words and how the materiality of the world forces us to put words on it. Beginning with the conundrum of how the things that make up our world are both shaped by and shape the ways in which we talk about, engage with and think about them, the author accepts the entanglement and then works backwards, using the metaphor of refraction to help articulate the structures, values and norms that discursively shape our world and our selves in it. Through a series of empirical examples taken from work on medical technologies and the body, Refracting through Technologies shows how researchers and designers can use material things - technologies - to refract discourses and articulate the concerns and voices producing them. Refraction as a metaphor is thus revealed to be an important concept, enabling scholars to apply analytical work to political concerns about the technological world. As such, it will appeal to scholars of sociology, science and technology studies, philosophy and design with interests in technoscience, feminist thought and social theory.
Learning by Refraction offers a fresh take on Ignatian pedagogy, curating what's most helpful from the latest education research and consolidating what has been tried and tested. A must-read for all educators, even those who may not know Ignatian pedagogy.
What contemporary prostate angst tells us about how we understand masculinity, aging, and sexuality. We are all suffering an acute case of prostate angst. Men worry about their own prostates and those of others close to them; women worry about the prostates of the men they love. The prostate--a gland located directly under the bladder--lurks on the periphery of many men's health issues, but as an object of anxiety it goes beyond the medical, affecting how we understand masculinity, aging, and sexuality. In A Cultural Biography of the Prostate, Ericka Johnson investigates what we think the prostate is and what we use the prostate to think about, examining it in historical, cultural, social, and medical contexts. Johnson shows that our ways of talking about, writing about, imagining, and imaging the prostate are a mess of entangled relationships. She describes current biomedical approaches, reports on the "discovery" of the prostate in the sixteenth century and its later appearance as both medical object and discursive trope, and explores present-day diagnostic practices for benign prostate hyperplasia--which transform a process (urination) into a thing (the prostate). Turning to the most anxiety-provoking prostate worry, prostate cancer, Johnson discusses PSA screening and the vulnerabilities it awakens (or sometimes silences) and then considers the presence of the absent prostate--how the prostate continues to affect lives after it has been removed in the name of health.
Now updated and expanded to cover the latest technologies, this full-color text on clinical refraction uses an easy-to-read format to give optometry students and practitioners all the important information they need. Also covers a wide range of other aspects of the eye exam, including anterior and posterior segment evaluations, contact lens, ocular pharmacology, and visual field analysis. Four new chapters cover wavefront-guided refraction, optical correction with refractive surgeries, prosthetic devices, and patients with ocular pathology. - Offer precise, step-by-step how-to's for performing all of the most effective refractive techniques. - Presents individualized refractive approaches for the full range of patients, including special patient populations. - Contriubtors are internationally recognized, leading authorities in the field. - New full-color design with full-color images throughout. - Completely updated and expanded to include current technologies. - A new chapter on Optical Correction with Refractive Surgeries, including keratoplasty, traditional refractive surgeries (e.g. LASIK and PRK), crystalline lens extraction with and without pseudophakia, the new presbyopic surgery, etc. - A new chapter on Wavefront Guided Refraction provides information on the advantages and limitations the Hartmann-Shack Method for objective refraction plus aberrometry and the refraction and the use of in the correction of the eye with spectacles, contact lenses, and refractive surgery. - A new chapter on Patients with Ocular Pathology reflects the most current knowledge of patients with ocular pathologies. - Provides information on Optical Correction with Prosthetic Devices, including corneal onlays, stromal implants, phakic intraocular lenses, etc. - Includes new chapters and/or discussions on such topics as: Aberrations of the Eye, Refractive Consequences of Eye Pathology, Diagnosis and Treatment of Dry Eye, Diagnosis of Pathology of the Anterior Segment, Diagnosis of Glaucoma, and Diagnosis of Pathology of the Posterior Segment. - Visual Acuity chapter expanded to include the effect of refractive error on visual acuity and statistics on how much of a change in visual acuity is significant. - Objective Refraction, Corneal Topography, and Visual Field Analysis chapters include the addition of new electro-optical and computer techniques and equipment. - Chapters on Multifocal Spectacle Lenses and Contact Lenses now cover newer progressive addition lenses and contact lenses that are now on the market. - Electrodiagnosis chapter revised to take a more clinical approach.
The new edition reorganizes its treatment of Greek science and significantly expands its coverage of industrial civilization and contemporary science and technology with new and revised chapters devoted to applied science, the sociology and economics of science, globalization, and the technological systems that underpin everyday life.
Learn about the revolutionary new technology of negative-refractionmetamaterials Negative-Refraction Metamaterials: Fundamental Principles andApplications introduces artificial materials that support theunusual electromagnetic property of negative refraction. Readerswill discover several classes of negative-refraction materialsalong with their exciting, groundbreaking applications, such aslenses and antennas, imaging with super-resolution, microwavedevices, dispersion-compensating interconnects, radar, anddefense. The book begins with a chapter describing the fundamentals ofisotropic metamaterials in which a negative index of refraction isdefined. In the following chapters, the text builds on thefundamentals by describing a range of useful microwave devices andantennas. Next, a broad spectrum of exciting new research andemerging applications is examined, including: * Theory and experiments behind a super-resolving,negative-refractive-index transmission-line lens * 3-D transmission-line metamaterials with a negative refractiveindex * Numerical simulation studies of negative refraction of Gaussianbeams and associated focusing phenomena * Unique advantages and theory of shaped lenses made ofnegative-refractive-index metamaterials * A new type of transmission-line metamaterial that is anisotropicand supports the formation of sharp steerable beams (resonancecones) * Implementations of negative-refraction metamaterials at opticalfrequencies * Unusual propagation phenomena in metallic waveguides partiallyfilled with negative-refractive-index metamaterials * Metamaterials in which the refractive index and the underlyinggroup velocity are both negative This work brings together the best minds in this cutting-edgefield. It is fascinating reading for scientists, engineers, andgraduate-level students in physics, chemistry, materials science,photonics, and electrical engineering.
This companion explores ANT as an intellectual practice, tracking its movements and engagements with a wide range of other academic and activist projects. Showcasing the work of a diverse set of ‘second generation’ ANT scholars from around the world, it highlights the exciting depth and breadth of contemporary ANT and its future possibilities. The companion has 38 chapters, each answering a key question about ANT and its capacities. Early chapters explore ANT as an intellectual practice and highlight ANT’s dialogues with other fields and key theorists. Others open critical, provocative discussions of its limitations. Later sections explore how ANT has been developed in a range of social scientific fields and how it has been used to explore a wide range of scales and sites. Chapters in the final section discuss ANT’s involvement in ‘real world’ endeavours such as disability and environmental activism, and even running a Chilean hospital. Each chapter contains an overview of relevant work and introduces original examples and ideas from the authors’ recent research. The chapters orient readers in rich, complex fields and can be read in any order or combination. Throughout the volume, authors mobilise ANT to explore and account for a range of exciting case studies: from wheelchair activism to parliamentary decision-making; from racial profiling to energy consumption monitoring; from queer sex to Korean cities. A comprehensive introduction by the editors explores the significance of ANT more broadly and provides an overview of the volume. The Routledge Companion to Actor-Network Theory will be an inspiring and lively companion to academics and advanced undergraduates and postgraduates from across many disciplines across the social sciences, including Sociology, Geography, Politics and Urban Studies, Environmental Studies and STS, and anyone wishing to engage with ANT, to understand what it has already been used to do and to imagine what it might do in the future.
Visioning Technologies brings together a collection of texts from leading theorists to examine how architecture has been, and is, reframed and restructured by the visual and theoretical frameworks introduced by different ‘technologies of sight’ – understood to include orthographic projection, perspective drawing, telescopic devices, photography, film and computer visualization, amongst others. Each chapter deals with its own area and historical period of expertise, organized sequentially to mark out and analyse the historical evolution of how architecture has been transformed by technologically induced shifts in human perception from the 15th century until today. This book underlines the way in which architectural forms and design processes have developed historically in conjunction with the systems of sight we manufacture technologically and suggests this continues today. Paradoxically, it is premised on the argument that these technological systems tend, in their initial formulations, to obtain ever greater realism in our visualizations of the physical world.
