Sullivan makes the case for geography as a powerful conceptual framework for seeing the everyday anew and for pushing back against its "givenness" its capacity to so fade into the background that it controls us in dangerously unexamined ways. He ranges across time, space, history, Marxian reproduction, the body, and the geographical mind.
The book will be an 'everyday' geography of the Global South that places 'development' in the background and brings detailed, grounded understanding of the ways in which individuals and household make a living.
Anthropologists, psychologists, feminists, and sociologists have long studied the “everyday,” the quotidian, the taken-for-granted; however, geographers have lagged behind in engaging with this slippery aspect of reality. Now, Rob Sullivan makes the case for geography as a powerful conceptual framework for seeing the everyday anew and for pushing back against its “givenness”: its capacity to so fade into the background that it controls us in dangerously unexamined ways. Drawing on a number of theorists (Foucault, Goffman, Marx, Lefebvre, Hägerstrand, and others), Sullivan unpacks the concepts and perceived realities that structure everyday life while grounding them in real-world cases, such as Nigeria’s troubled oil network, the working poor in the United States, China’s urban villages, and ultra-high-end housing in London and Cairo. In examining the everyday from a geographical perspective, Sullivan ranges widely across time, space, history, geography, Marxian reproduction, the body, and the geographical mind. The everyday, Sullivan suggests, is where change occurs and where resistance to change can begin. By locating the everyday through geography, we can help to make change possible. Whatever the issue, be it struggles over race, LGBT rights, class inequality, or global warming, the transformations required to achieve social justice all begin with transformation of the everyday order.
Tag along on this New York Times bestselling “witty, entertaining romp” (The New York Times Book Review) as Eric Weiner travels the world, from Athens to Silicon Valley—and back through history, too—to show how creative genius flourishes in specific places at specific times. In this “intellectual odyssey, traveler’s diary, and comic novel all rolled into one” (Daniel Gilbert, author of Stumbling on Happiness), acclaimed travel writer Weiner sets out to examine the connection between our surroundings and our most innovative ideas. A “superb travel guide: funny, knowledgeable, and self-deprecating” (The Washington Post), he explores the history of places like Vienna of 1900, Renaissance Florence, ancient Athens, Song Dynasty Hangzhou, and Silicon Valley to show how certain urban settings are conducive to ingenuity. With his trademark insightful humor, this “big-hearted humanist” (The Wall Street Journal) walks the same paths as the geniuses who flourished in these settings to see if the spirit of what inspired figures like Socrates, Michelangelo, and Leonardo remains. In these places, Weiner asks, “What was in the air, and can we bottle it?” “Fun and thought provoking” (The Miami Herald), The Geography of Genius reevaluates the importance of culture in nurturing creativity and “offers a practical map for how we can all become a bit more inventive” (Adam Grant, author of Originals).
What makes a nation happy? Is one country's sense of happiness the same as another's? In the last two decades, psychologists and economists have learned a lot about who's happy and who isn't. The Dutch are, the Romanians aren't, and Americans are somewhere in between... After years of going to the world's least happy countries, Eric Weiner, a veteran foreign correspondent, decided to travel and evaluate each country's different sense of happiness and discover the nation that seemed happiest of all. ·He discovers the relationship between money and happiness in tiny and extremely wealthy Qatar (and it's not a good one) ·He goes to Thailand, and finds that not thinking is a contented way of life. ·He goes to the tiny Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan, and discovers they have an official policy of Gross National Happiness! ·He asks himself why the British don't do happiness? In Weiner's quest to find the world's happiest places, he eats rotten Icelandic shark, meditates in Bangalore, visits strip clubs in Bangkok and drinks himself into a stupor in Reykjavik. Full of inspired moments, The Geography of Bliss accomplishes a feat few travel books dare and even fewer achieve: to make you happier.
This study contains 20 specially commissioned essays which attempt to present a critical challenge to the philosophical positivism of the "New Geography". The work attempts to shed light on the relationship between human agency and social and spatial structures.
An innovative introduction to Human Geography, exploring different ways of studying the relationships between people and place, and putting people at the centre of human geography. The book covers behavioural, humanistic and cultural traditions, showing how these can lead to a nuanced understanding of how we relate to our surroundings on a day-to-day basis. The authors also explore how human geography is currently influenced by 'postmodern' ideas stressing difference and diversity. While taking the importance of these different approaches seriously as ways of thinking about the role of place in peoples' everyday lives, the book also tries to encapsulate what has been so vibrant and exciting about human geography over the last couple of decades. By using examples to which students can relate - such as how they imagine and represent their home, the way they avoid certain spaces, how they move through retail spaces, where they choose to go to university, how they use the Internet, how they represent other nations and so on - the authors show how geography shapes everyday life in a manner that is seemingly mundane yet profoundly important.
When we use language, we presuppose many different things. Context is another name for these presuppositions. But it also can be the name of all these different presuppositions ordered in a certain way. This study of context focuses on the differences since many studies of context focus excessively on usage found in the sciences and in everyday observations. Other uses such as promising, giving directions, evaluating (i.e., ranking) all sorts of things around us, expressing our feelings, and issuing declarations (e.g., “You are promoted”) are equally important. The analogy of ‘geography,’ as used in this study, suggests that one important way to study context is to attend to all, not just one, of the “continents” found in the “planet” that we call context. Once we learn our geography lesson, we come to a better understanding of how context can change, how it can be ordered, and how it can be examined. We also learn how layered, and thus how complicated it is.
When war devastates their country, a boy and his parents are forced to flee to another country far east, where they must live in a small room shared with another couple. Food is scarce. But one day, when father goes to the bazaar to buy bread, he comes home with a map instead. The boy and his mother are furious, they are so hungry! But the map floods their cheerless room with colour. The boy becomes fascinated by it and is transported far away without ever leaving the room. Father was right to buy it, after all.
Winner of the Eugene M. Emme Astronautical Literature Award A Bloomberg View Must-Read Book of the Year A Choice Outstanding Academic Title of the Year “A substance-rich, original on every page exploration of how the space program interacted with the environmental movement, and also with the peace and ‘Whole Earth’ movements of the 1960s.” —Tyler Cowen, Marginal Revolution The summer of 1969 saw astronauts land on the moon for the first time and hippie hordes descend on Woodstock. This lively and original account of the space race makes the case that the conjunction of these two era-defining events was not entirely coincidental. With its lavishly funded mandate to put a man on the moon, the Apollo mission promised to reinvigorate a country that had lost its way. But a new breed of activists denounced it as a colossal waste of resources needed to solve pressing problems at home. Neil Maher reveals that there were actually unexpected synergies between the space program and the budding environmental, feminist and civil rights movements as photos from space galvanized environmentalists, women challenged the astronauts’ boys club and NASA’s engineers helped tackle inner city housing problems. Against a backdrop of Saturn V moonshots and Neil Armstrong’s giant leap for mankind, Apollo in the Age of Aquarius brings the cultural politics of the space race back down to planet Earth. “As a child in the 1960s, I was aware of both NASA’s achievements and social unrest, but unaware of the clashes between those two historical currents. Maher [captures] the maelstrom of the 1960s and 1970s as it collided with NASA’s program for human spaceflight.” —George Zamka, Colonel USMC (Ret.) and former NASA astronaut “NASA and Woodstock may now seem polarized, but this illuminating, original chronicle...traces multiple crosscurrents between them.” —Nature
