Social History of Knowledge
Social History of Knowledge

Author: Peter Burke

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2013-06-06

Total Pages: 648

ISBN-13: 0745676863

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In this book Peter Burke adopts a socio-cultural approach toexamine the changes in the organization of knowledge in Europe fromthe invention of printing to the publication of the FrenchEncyclopédie. The book opens with an assessment of different sociologies ofknowledge from Mannheim to Foucault and beyond, and goes on todiscuss intellectuals as a social group and the social institutions(especially universities and academies) which encouraged ordiscouraged intellectual innovation. Then, in a series of separatechapters, Burke explores the geography, anthropology, politics andeconomics of knowledge, focusing on the role of cities, academies,states and markets in the process of gathering, classifying,spreading and sometimes concealing information. The final chaptersdeal with knowledge from the point of view of the individualreader, listener, viewer or consumer, including the problem of thereliability of knowledge discussed so vigorously in the seventeenthcentury. One of the most original features of this book is its discussionof knowledges in the plural. It centres on printed knowledge,especially academic knowledge, but it treats the history of theknowledge 'explosion' which followed the invention of printing andthe discovery of the world beyond Europe as a process of exchangeor negotiation between different knowledges, such as male andfemale, theoretical and practical, high-status and low-status, andEuropean and non-European. Although written primarily as a contribution to social orsocio-cultural history, this book will also be of interest tohistorians of science, sociologists, anthropologists, geographersand others in another age of information explosion.

A Social History of Knowledge II
A Social History of Knowledge II

Author: Peter Burke

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2013-04-17

Total Pages: 389

ISBN-13: 0745659616

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Peter Burke follows up his magisterial Social History of Knowledge, picking up where the first volume left off around 1750 at the publication of the French Encyclopédie and following the story through to Wikipedia. Like the previous volume, it offers a social history (or a retrospective sociology of knowledge) in the sense that it focuses not on individuals but on groups, institutions, collective practices and general trends. The book is divided into 3 parts. The first argues that activities which appear to be timeless - gathering knowledge, analysing, disseminating and employing it - are in fact time-bound and take different forms in different periods and places. The second part tries to counter the tendency to write a triumphalist history of the 'growth' of knowledge by discussing losses of knowledge and the price of specialization. The third part offers geographical, sociological and chronological overviews, contrasting the experience of centres and peripheries and arguing that each of the main trends of the period - professionalization, secularization, nationalization, democratization, etc, coexisted and interacted with its opposite. As ever, Peter Burke presents a breath-taking range of scholarship in prose of exemplary clarity and accessibility. This highly anticipated second volume will be essential reading across the humanities and social sciences.

What is the History of Knowledge?
What is the History of Knowledge?

Author: Peter Burke

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2015-12-29

Total Pages: 129

ISBN-13: 1509503064

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What is the history of knowledge? This engaging and accessible introduction explains what is distinctive about the new field of the history of knowledge (or, as some scholars say, ‘knowledges in the plural’) and how it differs from the history of science, intellectual history, the sociology of knowledge or from cultural history. Leading cultural historian, Peter Burke, draws upon examples of this new kind of history from different periods and from the history of India, East Asia and the Islamic world as well as from Europe and the Americas. He discusses some of the main concepts used by scholars working in the field, among them ‘order of knowledge’, ‘situated knowledge’ and ‘knowledge society’. This book tells the story of the transformation of relatively raw ‘information’ into knowledge via processes of classification, verification and so on, the dissemination of this knowledge and finally its employment for different purposes, by governments, corporations or private individuals. A concluding chapter identifies central problems in the history of knowledge, from triumphalism to relativism, together with attempts to solve them. The only book of its kind yet to be published, What is the History of Knowledge? will be essential reading for all students of history and the humanities in general, as well as the interested general reader.

Reviewing Political Criticism
Reviewing Political Criticism

Author: Elisabeth K. Chaves

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-04-08

Total Pages: 188

ISBN-13: 1317063708

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Reviewing Political Criticism examines the rise of the ’review’ form of journal publication, from the early eighteenth to the early twenty-first centuries. The review belongs to a long tradition of written political criticism that first advised, then revised, and with the increased confidence afforded to civil society by the rise of market capitalism, subsequently challenged and even transformed the state’s view on what and how it governed. Chaves investigates the crucial nexus of intellectual debate with political judgment over this time, and highlights the review’s central role in upholding this connection. Focusing upon critical moments that required the exercise of political judgment, the book explains this journal form as a means of political practice, one that essentially ’re-views’ the state’s view of how society should be ordered. To understand critical activity, one must reflect on where this activity takes place-on the institutions of criticism that sustain it. Referred to by some as the ’natural habitat’ of intellectuals, journals, as the institutionalized sites of theoretical discourse, are often overlooked. This groundbreaking book offers a concentrated critique of the review form of journal publication as a medium for political thought and action, as a decisive site for political judgment by the state’s conservers and critics.

System
System

Author: Clifford Siskin

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2017-09-08

Total Pages: 332

ISBN-13: 0262534673

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The role that “system” has played in the shaping and reshaping of modern knowledge, from Galileo and Newton to our own “computational universe.” A system can describe what we see (the solar system), operate a computer (Windows 10), or be made on a page (the fourteen engineered lines of a sonnet). In this book, Clifford Siskin shows that system is best understood as a genre—a form that works physically in the world to mediate our efforts to understand it. Indeed, many Enlightenment authors published works they called “system” to compete with the essay and the treatise. Drawing on the history of system from Galileo's “message from the stars” and Newton's “system of the world” to today's “computational universe,” Siskin illuminates the role that the genre of system has played in the shaping and reshaping of modern knowledge. Previous engagements with systems have involved making them, using them, or imagining better ones. Siskin offers an innovative perspective by investigating system itself. He considers the past and present, moving from the “system of the world” to “a world full of systems.” He traces the turn to system in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and describes this primary form of Enlightenment as a mediator of political, cultural, and social modernity—pointing to the moment when people began to “blame the system” for working both too well (“you can't beat the system”) and not well enough (it always seems to “break down”). Throughout, his touchstones are: what system is and how it has changed; how it has mediated knowledge; and how it has worked in the world.

Mobility, Migration and Transport
Mobility, Migration and Transport

Author: Colin G. Pooley

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2017-05-19

Total Pages: 145

ISBN-13: 3319518836

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This book provides an innovative perspective on migration, mobility and transport. Using concepts drawn from migration history, mobilities studies and transport history it makes the case for greater integration of these disciplines. The approach is historical, demonstrating how past processes of travel and population movement have evolved, examining the continuities and changes that have occurred, and arguing that many of the concepts used in mobilities studies today are equally relevant to the past. The three central chapters view past population movements through, respectively, the lenses of migration history, mobilities studies and transport. Two further chapters demonstrate the diversity of mobility experiences and the opportunities and difficulties of applying this approach in teaching and research. Extensive case study material from around the world is used, including personal diaries, which vividly recreate the everyday experiences of past mobilities. Population movement has never been of more importance globally: this book demonstrates how knowledge of past mobility experiences can inform our understanding of the present.

Earline's Pink Party
Earline's Pink Party

Author: Elizabeth Findley Shores

Publisher: University of Alabama Press

Published: 2017-04-18

Total Pages: 344

ISBN-13: 0817319344

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In Earline’s Pink Party Elizabeth Findley Shores sifts through her family’s scattered artifacts to understand her grandmother’s life in relation to the troubled racial history of Tuscaloosa, Alabama. A compelling, genre-bending page-turner, Earline’s Pink Party: The Social Rituals and Domestic Relics of a Southern Woman analyzes the life of a small-city matron in the Deep South. A combination of biography, material culture analysis, social history, and memoir, this volume offers a new way of thinking about white racism through Shores’s conclusion that Earline’s earliest childhood experiences determined her worldview. Set against a fully drawn background of geography and culture and studded with detailed investigations of social rituals (such as women’s parties) and objects (such as books, handwritten recipes, and fabric scraps), Earline’s Pink Party tells the story of an ordinary woman, the grandmother Shores never knew. Looking for more than the details and drama of bourgeois Southern life, however, the author digs into generations of family history to understand how Earline viewed the racial terror that surrounded her during the Jim Crow years in this fairly typical southern town. Shores seeks to narrow a gap in the scholarship of the American South, which has tended to marginalize and stereotype well-to-do white women who lived after Emancipation. Exploring her grandmother’s home and its contents within the context of Tuscaloosa society and historical events, Shores evaluates the belief that women like Earline consciously engaged in performative rituals in order to sustain the “fantastical” view of the white nobility and the contented black underclass. With its engaging narrative, illustrations, and structure, this fascinating book should interest scholars of memory, class identity, and regional history, as well as sophisticated lay readers who enjoy Southern history, foodways, genealogy, and material culture.

Debating New Approaches to History
Debating New Approaches to History

Author: Marek Tamm

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2018-10-04

Total Pages: 393

ISBN-13: 1474281931

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With its innovative format, Debating New Approaches to History addresses issues currently at the top of the discipline's theoretical and methodological agenda. In its chapters, leading historians of both older and younger generations from across the Western world and beyond discuss and debate the main problems and challenges that historians are facing today. Each chapter is followed by a critical commentary from another key scholar in the field and the author's response. The volume looks at topics such as the importance and consequences of the 'digital turn' in history (what will history writing be like in a digital age?), the challenge of posthumanist theory for history writing (how do we write the history of non-humans?) and the possibilities of moving beyond traditional sources in history and establishing a dialogue with genetics and neurosciences (what are the perspectives and limits of the so-called 'neurohistory'?). It also revisits older debates in history which remain crucial, such as what the gender approach can offer to historical research or how to write history on a global scale. Debating New Approaches to History does not just provide a useful overview of the new approaches to history it covers, but also offers insights into current historical debates and the process of historical method in the making. It demonstrates how the discipline of history has responded to challenges in society – such as digitalization, globalization and environmental concerns – as well as in humanities and social sciences, such as the 'material turn', 'visual turn' or 'affective turn'. This is a key volume for all students of historiography wanting to keep their finger on the pulse of contemporary thinking in historical research.

Global Scientific Practice in an Age of Revolutions, 1750-1850
Global Scientific Practice in an Age of Revolutions, 1750-1850

Author: Patrick Manning

Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press

Published: 2016-09-27

Total Pages: 376

ISBN-13: 0822981483

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The century from 1750 to 1850 was a period of dramatic transformations in world history, fostering several types of revolutionary change beyond the political landscape. Independence movements in Europe, the Americas, and other parts of the world were catalysts for radical economic, social, and cultural reform. And it was during this age of revolutions—an era of rapidly expanding scientific investigation—that profound changes in scientific knowledge and practice also took place. In this volume, an esteemed group of international historians examines key elements of science in societies across Spanish America, Europe, West Africa, India, and Asia as they overlapped each other increasingly. Chapters focus on the range of participants in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century science, their concentrated effort in description and taxonomy, and advances in techniques for sharing knowledge. Together, contributors highlight the role of scientific change and development in tightening global and imperial connections, encouraging a deeper conversation among historians of science and world historians and shedding new light on a pivotal moment in history for both fields.

Leadership in The Digital Age
Leadership in The Digital Age

Author: Niklas Hageback

Publisher: Business Expert Press

Published: 2020-10-08

Total Pages: 128

ISBN-13: 1952538637

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This is a book for anyone intrigued by the complexities of digital leadership that require a capability to constantly balance the routines of everyday business with the ability to innovate. Finding the appropriate mix between the dichotomy stability—flexibility has been a delicate task that few, if any, corporations have properly managed to overcome. Why is that? This conundrum becomes acute as businesses embark on digital transformations, an often-painful venture highlighting the deficiencies of traditional management styles but also agile methodologies. They deliver results that are far below initial expectations, provide half-baked digital solutions where potential commercial gains are poorly captured and leveraged, and, far too often, not even identified. Mismatches between technologies, the man-machine (dis)connect, or organizational dysfunctionality are typically identified as root causes, but beneath them lurks a more scathing problem: an inadequate leadership. This inadequacy rests on a lack of holistic insights backed by well-rounded skills and sets of knowledge that are required to understand all aspects of a digital transformation, as well as its participants from employees to customers. Thus, what is needed is a modern take of the Renaissance Man.