Facing the Anthropocene
Facing the Anthropocene

Author: Ian Angus

Publisher: NYU Press

Published: 2016-07

Total Pages: 277

ISBN-13: 1583676090

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Science tells us that a new and dangerous stage in planetary evolution has begun—the Anthropocene, a time of rising temperatures, extreme weather, rising oceans, and mass species extinctions. Humanity faces not just more pollution or warmer weather, but a crisis of the Earth System. If business as usual continues, this century will be marked by rapid deterioration of our physical, social, and economic environment. Large parts of Earth will become uninhabitable, and civilization itself will be threatened. Facing the Anthropocene shows what has caused this planetary emergency, and what we must do to meet the challenge. Bridging the gap between Earth System science and ecological Marxism, Ian Angus examines not only the latest scientific findings about the physical causes and consequences of the Anthropocene transition, but also the social and economic trends that underlie the crisis. Cogent and compellingly written, Facing the Anthropocene offers a unique synthesis of natural and social science that illustrates how capitalism's inexorable drive for growth, powered by the rapid burning of fossil fuels that took millions of years to form, has driven our world to the brink of disaster. Survival in the Anthropocene, Angus argues, requires radical social change, replacing fossil capitalism with a new, ecosocialist civilization.

The World Crisis - and what to Do about it
The World Crisis - and what to Do about it

Author: Nicholas Maxwell

Publisher:

Published: 1901

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9789811234613

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"This philosophy of science book spells out in detail the changes that need to be made to academic inquiry and higher education, why they need to be made, and how they would enable universities to help humanity actively and effectively tackle and solve current global problems"--

State of Crisis
State of Crisis

Author: Zygmunt Bauman

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2014-07-17

Total Pages: 151

ISBN-13: 0745685293

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Today we hear much talk of crisis and comparisons are often made with the Great Depression of the 1930s, but there is a crucial difference that sets our current malaise apart from the 1930s: today we no longer trust in the capacity of the state to resolve the crisis and to chart a new way forward. In our increasingly globalized world, states have been stripped of much of their power to shape the course of events. Many of our problems are globally produced but the volume of power at the disposal of individual nation-states is simply not sufficient to cope with the problems they face. This divorce between power and politics produces a new kind of paralysis. It undermines the political agency that is needed to tackle the crisis and it saps citizens’ belief that governments can deliver on their promises. The impotence of governments goes hand in hand with the growing cynicism and distrust of citizens. Hence the current crisis is at once a crisis of agency, a crisis of representative democracy and a crisis of the sovereignty of the state. In this book the world-renowned sociologist Zygmunt Bauman and fellow traveller Carlo Bordoni explore the social and political dimensions of the current crisis. While this crisis has been greatly exacerbated by the turmoil following the financial crisis of 2007-8, Bauman and Bordoni argue that the crisis facing Western societies is rooted in a much more profound series of transformations that stretch back further in time and are producing long-lasting effects. This highly original analysis of our current predicament by two of the world’s leading social thinkers will be of interest to a wide readership.

Resonance
Resonance

Author: Hartmut Rosa

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2019-07-26

Total Pages: 551

ISBN-13: 1509519920

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The pace of modern life is undoubtedly speeding up, yet this acceleration does not seem to have made us any happier or more content. If acceleration is the problem, then the solution, argues Hartmut Rosa in this major new work, lies in “resonance.” The quality of a human life cannot be measured simply in terms of resources, options, and moments of happiness; instead, we must consider our relationship to, or resonance with, the world. Applying his theory of resonance to many domains of human activity, Rosa describes the full spectrum of ways in which we establish our relationship to the world, from the act of breathing to the adoption of culturally distinct worldviews. He then turns to the realms of concrete experience and action – family and politics, work and sports, religion and art – in which we as late modern subjects seek out resonance. This task is proving ever more difficult as modernity’s logic of escalation is both cause and consequence of a distorted relationship to the world, at individual and collective levels. As Rosa shows, all the great crises of modern society – the environmental crisis, the crisis of democracy, the psychological crisis – can also be understood and analyzed in terms of resonance and our broken relationship to the world around us. Building on his now classic work on acceleration, Rosa’s new book is a major new contribution to the theory of modernity, showing how our problematic relation to the world is at the crux of some of the most pressing issues we face today. This bold renewal of critical theory for our times will be of great interest to students and scholars across the social sciences and humanities.

The Psychology of Global Crises and Crisis Politics
The Psychology of Global Crises and Crisis Politics

Author: Irene Strasser

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2021-11-03

Total Pages: 365

ISBN-13: 3030769399

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This edited volume brings together some of the most prominent scholars in the fields of theoretical, critical, and political psychology to examine crisis phenomena. The book investigates the role of psychology as a science in times of crisis, discusses how socio-political change affects the discipline and profession, and renders psychological interventions as forms of political action. The authors examine how notions of crisis and the interpretation of crisis scenarios are heavily intertwined with governmental and state interests. Seeking to disentangle individual subjectivity, subjectification, and science as forms of politics, the volume works toward an explicit goal to decolonize psychology. The chapters elaborate on the importance of the psychological sciences in times of crisis and the role of psychologists as practitioners. Ultimately, the diverse contributions underline the connection of scientific theory, practice, and politics. Interdisciplinary in scope and wide-ranging in its perspectives, this timely work will appeal to students and scholars of theoretical and political psychology, critical psychology, and cultural studies.

The Social Sciences in a Global Age
The Social Sciences in a Global Age

Author: Dipankar Sinha

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2020-11-25

Total Pages: 174

ISBN-13: 1000224252

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The book focuses on the status and role of the social sciences in the current millennium. Drawing inspiration from a range of theorists, it critically examines the key debates on the social science stream and focuses on its ir/relevance in our times in the background of changing state-market dialectics. It specifically scrutinises knowledge politics of the global times to reveal how the neoliberal project aligns and fuses steep economic ‘conditionalities’ with professional cultural parameters of higher academia to constrain autonomy and weaken radical expressions in social science pedagogy and research. Asserting that the humanistic core of social sciences has the potential to resist acts of reducing knowledge to a monochromatic form, the book argues that the social science stream can challenge and resist such hegemonic ambitions. It also identifies and analyses the contradictions, dilemmas, predicaments and false steps of social scientists, and avoids a reductive approach based on the ‘west versus non-west’ binary. The volume will be of interest to scholars and researchers of the social sciences in general, and of sociology/politics of knowledge, political theory, political sociology and education in particular.

Social Science Research
Social Science Research

Author: Anol Bhattacherjee

Publisher: CreateSpace

Published: 2012-04-01

Total Pages: 156

ISBN-13: 9781475146127

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This book is designed to introduce doctoral and graduate students to the process of conducting scientific research in the social sciences, business, education, public health, and related disciplines. It is a one-stop, comprehensive, and compact source for foundational concepts in behavioral research, and can serve as a stand-alone text or as a supplement to research readings in any doctoral seminar or research methods class. This book is currently used as a research text at universities on six continents and will shortly be available in nine different languages.

World Crisis, The - And What To Do About It: A Revolution For Thought And Action
World Crisis, The - And What To Do About It: A Revolution For Thought And Action

Author: Nicholas Maxwell

Publisher: World Scientific

Published: 2021-04-07

Total Pages: 208

ISBN-13: 9811234620

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Science and technology have made the modern world possible, but also created all the global problems that threaten our future: the climate crisis, the COVID-19 pandemic, mass extinction of species, environmental degradation, overpopulation, lethal modern war, and the menace of nuclear weapons. Nicholas Maxwell, world-renowned philosopher of science and author of 14 books, argues that all these problems have come about because humans have solved only the first of two great problems of learning — how to acquire scientific knowledge and technological know-how — but not the second — how to create a civilized, wise world.The key disaster of our times is that we have science without wisdom. At present, universities all over the world are devoted to the pursuit of specialized knowledge and technology, or 'knowledge-inquiry'. Maxwell contends that they need to be radically transformed so that their basic function becomes to help humanity tackle global problems, with a more rigorous and socially beneficial perspective he calls 'wisdom-inquiry'. The World Crisis — And What to Do About It spells out in detail the changes that need to be made to academic inquiry, why they need to be made, and how they would enable universities to help humanity actively and effectively tackle and solve current global problems.Related Link(s)

Designing Social Inquiry
Designing Social Inquiry

Author: Gary King

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 1994-05-22

Total Pages: 259

ISBN-13: 0691034710

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Designing Social Inquiry focuses on improving qualitative research, where numerical measurement is either impossible or undesirable. What are the right questions to ask? How should you define and make inferences about causal effects? How can you avoid bias? How many cases do you need, and how should they be selected? What are the consequences of unavoidable problems in qualitative research, such as measurement error, incomplete information, or omitted variables? What are proper ways to estimate and report the uncertainty of your conclusions?

Humanitarianism and Mass Migration
Humanitarianism and Mass Migration

Author: Marcelo Suarez-Orozco

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2019-01-08

Total Pages: 410

ISBN-13: 0520969626

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The world is witnessing a rapid rise in the number of victims of human trafficking and of migrants—voluntary and involuntary, internal and international, authorized and unauthorized. In the first two decades of this century alone, more than 65 million people have been forced to escape home into the unknown. The slow-motion disintegration of failing states with feeble institutions, war and terror, demographic imbalances, unchecked climate change, and cataclysmic environmental disruptions have contributed to the catastrophic migrations that are placing millions of human beings at grave risk. Humanitarianism and Mass Migration fills a scholarly gap by examining the uncharted contours of mass migration. Exceptionally curated, it contains contributions from Jacqueline Bhabha, Richard Mollica, Irina Bokova, Pedro Noguera, Hirokazu Yoshikawa, James A. Banks, Mary Waters, and many others. The volume’s interdisciplinary and comparative approach showcases new research that reveals how current structures of health, mental health, and education are anachronistic and out of touch with the new cartographies of mass migrations. Envisioning a hopeful and realistic future, this book provides clear and concrete recommendations for what must be done to mine the inherent agency, cultural resources, resilience, and capacity for self-healing that will help forcefully displaced populations.