Vulnerability in Technological Cultures
Vulnerability in Technological Cultures

Author: Anique Hommels

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2014-03-21

Total Pages: 399

ISBN-13: 0262027100

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"Novel technologies and scientific advancements offer not only opportunities but risks. Technological systems are vulnerable to human error and technical malfunctioning that have far-reaching consequences: one flipped switch can cause a cascading power failure across a networked electric grid. Yet, once addressed, vulnerability accompanied by coping mechanisms may yield a more flexible and resilient society. This book investigates vulnerability, in both its negative and positive aspects, in technological cultures. The contributors argue that viewing risk in terms of vulnerability offers a novel approach to understanding the risks and benefits of science and technology. Such an approach broadens conventional risk analysis by connecting to issues of justice, solidarity, and livelihood, and enabling comparisons between the global north and south. The book explores case studies that range from agricultural practices in India to neonatal intensive care medicine in Western hospitals; these cases, spanning the issues addressed in the book, illustrate what vulnerability is and does. The book offers conceptual frameworks for empirical description and analysis of vulnerability that elucidate its ambiguity, context dependence, and constructed nature. Finally, the book addresses the implications of these analyses for the governance of vulnerability, proposing a more reflexive way of dealing with vulnerability in technological cultures"--

Vulnerability in Technological Cultures
Vulnerability in Technological Cultures

Author: Anique Hommels

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2014-03-21

Total Pages: 399

ISBN-13: 0262525801

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"Novel technologies and scientific advancements offer not only opportunities but risks. Technological systems are vulnerable to human error and technical malfunctioning that have far-reaching consequences: one flipped switch can cause a cascading power failure across a networked electric grid. Yet, once addressed, vulnerability accompanied by coping mechanisms may yield a more flexible and resilient society. This book investigates vulnerability, in both its negative and positive aspects, in technological cultures. The contributors argue that viewing risk in terms of vulnerability offers a novel approach to understanding the risks and benefits of science and technology. Such an approach broadens conventional risk analysis by connecting to issues of justice, solidarity, and livelihood, and enabling comparisons between the global north and south. The book explores case studies that range from agricultural practices in India to neonatal intensive care medicine in Western hospitals; these cases, spanning the issues addressed in the book, illustrate what vulnerability is and does. The book offers conceptual frameworks for empirical description and analysis of vulnerability that elucidate its ambiguity, context dependence, and constructed nature. Finally, the book addresses the implications of these analyses for the governance of vulnerability, proposing a more reflexive way of dealing with vulnerability in technological cultures"--

Science and Digital Technology for Cultural Heritage - Interdisciplinary Approach to Diagnosis, Vulnerability, Risk Assessment and Graphic Information Models
Science and Digital Technology for Cultural Heritage - Interdisciplinary Approach to Diagnosis, Vulnerability, Risk Assessment and Graphic Information Models

Author: Pilar Ortiz Calderón

Publisher: CRC Press

Published: 2019-11-28

Total Pages: 466

ISBN-13: 1000026523

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The scientific and technological advances that influence the protection of cultural heritage are developing at an ever-increasing pace. Systems to explore, research and analyse their materiality, to control the different scopes, or to represent and model them have reached an unprecedented dimension in recent decades. The Network of Science and Technology for the Conservation of Cultural Heritage aims to promote collaboration between the agents of these systems, in order to facilitate the sharing of experiences and to foster technology transfer, with the common goal of contributing to the conservation of Cultural Heritage. In the context of the TechnoHeritage Network, the fourth edition of the International Congress on Science and Technology for the Conservation of Cultural Heritage was held March 26-30, 2019, in Seville, Spain. This Congress was an international meeting of researchers and specialists from multiple areas, whose line of work is the knowledge and conservation of Cultural Heritage. Among all the topics discussed, the role and impact of digital technologies for the knowledge, maintenance, management and dissemination of cultural heritage should be highlighted. Digital media modify the way of understanding this heritage, of perceiving it and transmitting it, and offer a new horizon of strategies to make decision-making more sustainable over time.

Handbook of Infrastructures and Cities
Handbook of Infrastructures and Cities

Author: Olivier Coutard

Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing

Published: 2024-04-12

Total Pages: 483

ISBN-13: 1800889151

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Contributing towards a thriving research area, this comprehensive Handbook presents a broad discussion of infrastructure as social phenomena. It compiles diverse perspectives to delineate the current ‘infrastructural turn’ and assess policy and research challenges relating to contemporary forms of infrastructural development.

Representing Vulnerabilities in Contemporary Literature
Representing Vulnerabilities in Contemporary Literature

Author: Miriam Fernández-Santiago

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2022-12-01

Total Pages: 216

ISBN-13: 1000827984

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Representing Vulnerabilities in Contemporary Literature includes a collection of essays exploring the ways in which recent literary representations of vulnerability may problematize its visibilization from an ethical and aesthetic perspective. Recent technological and scientific developments have accentuated human vulnerability in many and different ways at a cross-national, and even cross-species level. Disability, technological, and ecological vulnerabilities are new foci of interest that add up to gender, precarity and trauma, among others, as forms of vulnerability in this volume. The literary visualization of these vulnerabilities might help raise social awareness of one’s own vulnerabilities as well as those of others so as to bring about global solidarity based on affinity and affect. However, the literary representation of forms of vulnerability might also deepen stigmatization phenomena and trivialize the spectacularization of vulnerability by blunting readers’ affective response towards those products that strive to hold their attention and interest in an information-saturated, global entertainment market.

Human Being @ Risk
Human Being @ Risk

Author: Mark Coeckelbergh

Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media

Published: 2013-02-15

Total Pages: 226

ISBN-13: 9400760256

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Whereas standard approaches to risk and vulnerability presuppose a strict separation between humans and their world, this book develops an existential-phenomenological approach according to which we are always already beings-at-risk. Moreover, it is argued that in our struggle against vulnerability, we create new vulnerabilities and thereby transform ourselves as much as we transform the world. Responding to the discussion about human enhancement and information technologies, the book then shows that this dynamic-relational approach has important implications for the evaluation of new technologies and their risks. It calls for a normative anthropology of vulnerability that does not ask which objective risks are acceptable, how we can become invulnerable, or which technologies threaten human nature, but which vulnerability transformations we want. To the extent that we can steer the growth of new technologies at all, this tragic and sometimes comic project should therefore be guided by what we want to become.​

Vulnerability in Scandinavian Art and Culture
Vulnerability in Scandinavian Art and Culture

Author: Adriana Margareta Dancus

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2020-03-30

Total Pages: 324

ISBN-13: 3030373827

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In this open access book, seventeen scholars discuss how contemporary Scandinavian art and media have become important arenas to articulate and stage various forms of vulnerability in the Scandinavian welfare states. How do discourses of privilege and vulnerability coexist and interact in Scandinavia? How do the Scandinavian countries respond to vulnerability given increased migration? How is vulnerability distributed in terms of margin and centre, normality and deviance? And how can vulnerability be used to move audiences towards each other and accomplish change? We address these questions in an interdisciplinary study that brings examples from celebrated and provocative fiction and documentary films, TV-series, reality TV, art installations, design, literature, graphic art, radio podcasts and campaigns on social media.

Cultural Technologies Within a Technological Culture
Cultural Technologies Within a Technological Culture

Author: Christian Papilloud

Publisher: LIT Verlag Münster

Published: 2008

Total Pages: 173

ISBN-13: 3825811476

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While there is already a huge research literature marked by the sociology of technology, the analyses gathered in this volume try to go beyond classical sociological approaches. Rather, the idea is that crossing traditional boundaries will lead to new results when it comes to understanding the effects of technologies. This idea is based on the assumption that the implementation of technology in daily life is no longer directly associated with binaries such as "technology - nature", "object - subject", "alienated and creative activities", "social determination and self-determination", "material culture and social practices" or "interactive communication and mediated communication". In fact, technology gains social relevance as it is uniquely embedded into cultural practices. So far, this argument holds espe'cially true for analyses within the sociology of culture, ethnome'thodology and related fields. While these fields have primarily dealt with "old" technologies like communication skills, body performances or trained craftsmanship, their fundamental argument should be extended to the more advanced technologies and to the use of latest high-tech.

Cultures of Technology and the Quest for Innovation
Cultures of Technology and the Quest for Innovation

Author: Helga Nowotny

Publisher: Berghahn Books

Published: 2006-02-01

Total Pages: 232

ISBN-13: 1782389644

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Underlying the current dynamics of technological developments, their divergence or convergence and the abundance of options, promises and risks they contain, is the quest for innovation, the contributors to this volume argue. The seemingly insatiable demand for novelty coincides with the rise of modern science and the onset of modernity in Western societies. Never before has the Baconian dream been so close to becoming reality: wrapped into a globalizing capitalism that seeks ever expanding markets for new products, artifacts and designs and new processes that lead to gains in efficiency, productivity and profit. However, approaching these developments through a wider historical and cultural perspectives, means to raise questions about the plurality of cultures, the interaction between "hardware" and "software" and about the nature of the interfaces where technology meets with economic, social, legal, historical constraints and opportunities. The authors come to the conclusion that inside a seemingly homogenous package and a seemingly universal quest for innovation many differences remain.