Controversy Mapping
Controversy Mapping

Author: Tommaso Venturini

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2021-12-01

Total Pages: 334

ISBN-13: 1509544526

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As disputes concerning the environment, the economy, and pandemics occupy public debate, we need to learn to navigate matters of public concern when facts are in doubt and expertise is contested. Controversy Mapping is the first book to introduce readers to the observation and representation of contested issues on digital media. Drawing on actor-network theory and digital methods, Venturini and Munk outline the conceptual underpinnings and the many tools and techniques of controversy mapping. They review its history in science and technology studies, discuss its methodological potential, and unfold its political implications. Through a range of cases and examples, they demonstrate how to chart actors and issues using digital fieldwork and computational techniques. A preface by Richard Rogers and an interview with Bruno Latour are also included. A crucial field guide and hands-on companion for the digital age, Controversy Mapping is an indispensable resource for students and scholars of media and communication, as well as activists, journalists, citizens, and decision makers.

Mapping Controversies in Architecture
Mapping Controversies in Architecture

Author: Professor Albena Yaneva

Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.

Published: 2013-06-28

Total Pages: 148

ISBN-13: 1409482987

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The book tackles a number of challenging questions: How can we conceptualize architectural objects and practices without falling into the divides architecture/society, nature/culture, materiality/meaning? How can we prevent these abstractions from continuing to blind architectural theory? What is the alternative to critical architecture? Mapping controversies is a research method and teaching philosophy that allows divides to be crossed. It offers a new methodology for following debates surrounding contested urban knowledge. Engaging in explorations of on-going and recent controversies and re-visiting some well-known debates, the analysis foregrounds, traces and maps the changing sets of positions triggered by design: the 2012 Olympics stadium in London, the Welsh parliament in Cardiff, the Heathrow airport runway extension, the Sydney Opera House, the Eiffel Tower. By mobilizing digital technologies and new computational design techniques we are able to visualize the variety of factors that impinge on design and track actors' trajectories, changing groupings, concerns and modalities of action. The book places architecture at the intersection of the human and the nonhuman, the particular and the general. It allows its networks to be re-established and to run between local and global, social and technical. Mapping controversies can be extrapolated to a wide range of complex phenomena of hybrid nature.

Time and Social Theory
Time and Social Theory

Author: Barbara Adam

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2013-03-01

Total Pages: 346

ISBN-13: 0745669395

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Time is at the forefront of contemporary scholarly inquiry across the natural sciences and the humanities. Yet the social sciences have remained substantially isolated from time-related concerns. This book argues that time should be a key part of social theory and focuses concern upon issues which have emerged as central to an understanding of today's social world. Through her analysis of time Barbara Adam shows that our contemporary social theories are firmly embedded in Newtonian science and classical dualistic philosophy. She exposes these classical frameworks of thought as inadequate to the task of conceptualizing our contemporary world of standardized time, computers, nuclear power and global telecommunications.

Rhumb Lines and Map Wars
Rhumb Lines and Map Wars

Author: Mark Monmonier

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2010-11-15

Total Pages: 257

ISBN-13: 0226534324

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In Rhumb Lines and Map Wars, Mark Monmonier offers an insightful, richly illustrated account of the controversies surrounding Flemish cartographer Gerard Mercator's legacy. He takes us back to 1569, when Mercator announced a clever method of portraying the earth on a flat surface, creating the first projection to take into account the earth's roundness. As Monmonier shows, mariners benefited most from Mercator's projection, which allowed for easy navigation of the high seas with rhumb lines—clear-cut routes with a constant compass bearing—for true direction. But the projection's popularity among nineteenth-century sailors led to its overuse—often in inappropriate, non-navigational ways—for wall maps, world atlases, and geopolitical propaganda. Because it distorts the proportionate size of countries, the Mercator map was criticized for inflating Europe and North America in a promotion of colonialism. In 1974, German historian Arno Peters proffered his own map, on which countries were ostensibly drawn in true proportion to one another. In the ensuing "map wars" of the 1970s and 1980s, these dueling projections vied for public support—with varying degrees of success. Widely acclaimed for his accessible, intelligent books on maps and mapping, Monmonier here examines the uses and limitations of one of cartography's most significant innovations. With informed skepticism, he offers insightful interpretations of why well-intentioned clerics and development advocates rallied around the Peters projection, which flagrantly distorted the shape of Third World nations; why journalists covering the controversy ignored alternative world maps and other key issues; and how a few postmodern writers defended the Peters worldview with a self-serving overstatement of the power of maps. Rhumb Lines and Map Wars is vintage Monmonier: historically rich, beautifully written, and fully engaged with the issues of our time.

Theory of the Hashtag
Theory of the Hashtag

Author: Andreas Bernard

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2019-08-05

Total Pages: 114

ISBN-13: 1509539204

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This is a short book about the most prominent sign of our times. The simple # sign is now used so widely that it is easy to overlook the fundamental effects it has had in the structuring of public debate. With its help, statements are bundled together and discourse is organized and amplified around common buzzwords. This method enables us to navigate more easily the huge volume of online utterances, but it also increases the risk of leveling statements and extinguishing difference, as exemplified by the #MeToo debate. Andreas Bernard traces the young and spectacular career of the humble hashtag. He follows the history of the # sign, documenting its use by Twitter and Instagram, and then examines the most prominent contemporary domains of the sign in socio-political activism and in marketing – two apparently very different fields which are united in their passion for the hashtag. Theory of the Hashtag shines a bright light on a small but pervasive feature of our contemporary digital culture and shows how it is surreptitiously shaping the public sphere.

Foundational Issues in Human Brain Mapping
Foundational Issues in Human Brain Mapping

Author: Stephen José Hanson

Publisher: Bradford Books

Published: 2010

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9780262513944

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The field of neuroimaging has reached a watershed and critiques and emerging trends are raising foundational issues of methodology, measurement, and theory. Here, scholars reexamine these issues and explore controversies that have arisen in cognitive science, cognitive neuroscience, computer science, and signal processing.

Abortion Politics
Abortion Politics

Author: Ziad Munson

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2018-05-21

Total Pages: 140

ISBN-13: 0745688829

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Abortion has remained one of the most volatile and polarizing issues in the United States for over four decades. Americans are more divided today than ever over abortion, and this debate colors the political, economic, and social dynamics of the country. This book provides a balanced, clear-eyed overview of the abortion debate, including the perspectives of both the pro-life and pro-choice movements. It covers the history of the debate from colonial times to the present, the mobilization of mass movements around the issue, the ways it is understood by ordinary Americans, the impact it has had on US political development, and the differences between the abortion conflict in the US and the rest of the world. Throughout these discussions, Ziad Munson demonstrates how the meaning of abortion has shifted to reflect the changing anxieties and cultural divides which it has come to represent. Abortion Politics is an invaluable companion for exploring the abortion issue and what it has to say about American society, as well as the dramatic changes in public understanding of women’s rights, medicine, religion, and partisanship.

Global Health and International Relations
Global Health and International Relations

Author: Colin McInnes

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2013-05-02

Total Pages: 238

ISBN-13: 0745663079

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The long separation of health and International Relations, as distinct academic fields and policy arenas, has now dramatically changed. Health, concerned with the body, mind and spirit, has traditionally focused on disease and infirmity, whilst International Relations has been dominated by concerns of war, peace and security. Since the 1990s, however, the two fields have increasingly overlapped. How can we explain this shift and what are the implications for the future development of both fields? Colin McInnes and Kelley Lee examine four key intersections between health and International Relations today - foreign policy and health diplomacy, health and the global political economy, global health governance and global health security. The explosion of interest in these subjects has, in large part, been due to "real world" concerns - disease outbreaks, antibiotic resistance, counterfeit drugs and other risks to human health amid the spread of globalisation. Yet the authors contend that it is also important to understand how global health has been socially constructed, shaped in theory and practice by particular interests and normative frameworks. This groundbreaking book encourages readers to step back from problem-solving to ask how global health is being problematized in the first place, why certain agendas and issue areas are prioritised, and what determines the potential solutions put forth to address them? The palpable struggle to better understand the health risks facing a globalized world, and to strengthen collective action to deal with them effectively, begins - they argue - with a more reflexive and critical approach to this rapidly emerging subject.

Crisis
Crisis

Author: Sylvia Walby

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2015-10-30

Total Pages: 174

ISBN-13: 150950320X

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We are living in a time of crisis which has cascaded through society. Financial crisis has led to an economic crisis of recession and unemployment; an ensuing fiscal crisis over government deficits and austerity has led to a political crisis which threatens to become a democratic crisis. Borne unevenly, the effects of the crisis are exacerbating class and gender inequalities. Rival interpretations – a focus on ‘austerity’ and reduction in welfare spending versus a focus on ‘financial crisis’ and democratic regulation of finance – are used to justify radically diverse policies for the distribution of resources and strategies for economic growth, and contested gender relations lie at the heart of these debates. The future consequences of the crisis depend upon whether there is a deepening of democratic institutions, including in the European Union. Sylvia Walby offers an alternative framework within which to theorize crisis, drawing on complexity science and situating this within the wider field of study of risk, disaster and catastrophe. In doing so, she offers a critique and revision of the social science needed to understand the crisis.