Making Sense of Nature
Making Sense of Nature

Author: Noel Castree

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2013-08-15

Total Pages: 397

ISBN-13: 1134613903

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We listen to a cacophony of voices instructing us how to think and feel about nature, including our own bodies. The news media, wildlife documentaries, science magazines, and environmental NGOs are among those clamouring for our attention. But are we empowered by all this knowledge or is our dependence on various communities allowing our thoughts, sentiments and activities to be unduly governed by others? Making Sense of Nature shows that what we call ‘nature’ is made sense of for us in ways that make it central to social order, social change and social dissent. By utilising insights and extended examples from anthropology, cultural studies, human geography, philosophy, politics, sociology, science studies, this interdisciplinary text asks whether we can better make sense of nature for ourselves, and thus participate more meaningfully in momentous decisions about the future of life – human and non-human – on the planet. This book shows how ‘nature’ can be made sense of without presuming its naturalness. The challenge is not so much to rid ourselves of the idea of nature and its ‘collateral concepts’ (such as genes) but instead, we need to be more alert to how, why and with what effects ideas about ‘nature’ get fashioned and deployed in specific situations. Among other things, the book deals with science and scientists, the mass media and journalists, ecotourism, literature and cinema, environmentalists, advertising and big business. This innovative text contains numerous case studies and examples from daily life to put theory and subject matter into context, as well as study tasks, a glossary and suggested further reading. The case studies cover a range of topics, range from forestry in Canada and Guinea, to bestiality in Washington State, to how human genetics is reported in Western newspapers, to participatory science experiments in the UK. Making Sense of Nature will empower readers from a wide range of fields across the social sciences, humanities and physical sciences.

Nature
Nature

Author: Noel Castree

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2005-11-17

Total Pages: 320

ISBN-13: 1134302150

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Exploring the shifting ways in which geographers have studied nature, this book emphasizes the relationships and differences between human geography, physical geography and resource and hazards geography. The first to consider the topic of nature in modern geography as a whole, this distinctive text looks at all its major meanings, from the human body and psyche through to the non-human world, and develops the argument that student readers should abandon the idea of knowing what nature is in favour of a close scrutiny of what agendas lie behind competing conceptions of it. It deals with, amongst others, the following areas: the idea of nature the 'nature' of geography de-naturalization and re-naturalization after-nature. As everything from global warming to GM foods becomes headline news, the use and abuse of nature is on the agenda as never before. Synthesizing a wealth of diverse and complex information, this text makes the significant theories, debates and information on nature accessible to students of geography, environmental studies, sociology, and cultural studies.

Our Oldest Task
Our Oldest Task

Author: Eric T. Freyfogle

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2017-08-28

Total Pages: 237

ISBN-13: 022632642X

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“This is a book about nature and culture,” Eric T. Freyfogle writes, “about our place and plight on earth, and the nagging challenges we face in living on it in ways that might endure.” Challenges, he says, we are clearly failing to meet. Harking back to a key phrase from the essays of eminent American conservationist Aldo Leopold, Our Oldest Task spins together lessons from history and philosophy, the life sciences and politics, economics and cultural studies in a personal, erudite quest to understand how we might live on—and in accord with—the land. Passionate and pragmatic, extraordinarily well read and eloquent, Freyfogle details a host of forces that have produced our self-defeating ethos of human exceptionalism. It is this outlook, he argues, not a lack of scientific knowledge or inadequate technology, that is the primary cause of our ecological predicament. Seeking to comprehend both the multifaceted complexity of contemporary environmental problems and the zeitgeist as it unfolds, Freyfogle explores such diverse topics as morality, the nature of reality (and the reality of nature), animal welfare, social justice movements, and market politics. The result is a learned and inspiring rallying cry to achieve balance, a call to use our knowledge to more accurately identify the dividing line between living in and on the world and destruction. “To use nature,” Freyfogle writes, “but not to abuse it.”

Making Sense of Natural Disasters
Making Sense of Natural Disasters

Author: Graham Dwyer

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2022-03-08

Total Pages: 149

ISBN-13: 3030947785

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This book examines the ways in which emergency management organizations make sense and learn from natural disasters. Examining recent bushfires in Australia, it demonstrates that whilst public inquiries that follow such disasters can be important for learning and change, they have ultimately created a learning vacuum insofar as their recommendations repeat themselves. This has kept governments and society focused on learning lessons about the past, rather than for the future. Accordingly, this book recommends a new approach to sensemaking and learning focused on prospective planning rather than retrospective recommendations, and where planning for the future is seen as the shared responsibility of the government, society, and the emergency management community in Australia and beyond.

Making Sense of Nature
Making Sense of Nature

Author: Noel Castree

Publisher:

Published: 2013-08-15

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9780203503461

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We listen to a cacophony of voices instructing us how to think and feel about nature, including our own bodies. The news media, wildlife documentaries, science magazines, and environmental NGOs are among those clamouring for our attention. But are we empowered by all this knowledge or is our dependence on various communities allowing our thoughts, sentiments and activities to be unduly governed by others? Making Sense of Nature shows that what we call 'nature' is made sense of for us in ways that make it central to social order, social change and social dissent. By utilising insights and extended examples from anthropology, cultural studies, human geography, philosophy, politics, sociology, science studies, this interdisciplinary text asks whether we can better make sense of nature for ourselves, and thus participate more meaningfully in momentous decisions about the future of life - human and non-human - on the planet. This book shows how 'nature' can be made sense of without presuming its naturalness. The challenge is not so much to rid ourselves of the idea of nature and its 'collateral concepts' (such as genes) but instead, we need to be more alert to how, why and with what effects ideas about 'nature' get fashioned and deployed in specific situations. Among other things, the book deals with science and scientists, the mass media and journalists, ecotourism, literature and cinema, environmentalists, advertising and big business. This innovative text contains numerous case studies and examples from daily life to put theory and subject matter into context, as well as study tasks, a glossary and suggested further reading. The case studies cover a range of topics, range from forestry in Canada and Guinea, to bestiality in Washington State, to how human genetics is reported in Western newspapers, to participatory science experiments in the UK. Making Sense of Nature will empower readers from a wide range of fields across the social sciences, humanities and physical sciences.

Making Sense, Making Worlds
Making Sense, Making Worlds

Author: Nicholas Onuf

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2013-05-07

Total Pages: 280

ISBN-13: 1136219463

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Nicholas Onuf is a leading scholar in international relations and introduced constructivism to international relations, coining the term constructivism in his book World of Our Making (1989). He was featured as one of twelve scholars featured in Iver B. Neumann and Ole Wæver, eds., The Future of International Relations: Masters in the Making? (1996); and featured in Martin Griffiths, Steven C. Roach and M. Scott Solomon, Fifty Key Thinkers in International Relations, 2nd ed. (2009). This powerful collection of essays clarifies Onuf’s approach to international relations and makes a decisive contribution to the debates in IR concerning theory. It embeds the theoretical project in the wider horizon of how we understand ourselves and the world. Onuf updates earlier themes and his general constructivist approach, and develops some newer lines of research, such as the work on metaphors and the re-grounding in much more Aristotle than before. A complement to the author’s groundbreaking book of 1989, World of Our Making, this tightly argued book draws extensively from philosophy and social theory to advance constructivism in International Relations. Making Sense, Making Worlds will be vital reading for students and scholars of international relations, international relations theory, social theory and law.

Making Sense of Humanity
Making Sense of Humanity

Author: Bernard Williams

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 1995-06-30

Total Pages: 268

ISBN-13: 9780521478687

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Collection of philosophical papers

Making Sense of Health, Disease, and the Environment in Cross-Cultural History: The Arabic-Islamic World, China, Europe, and North America
Making Sense of Health, Disease, and the Environment in Cross-Cultural History: The Arabic-Islamic World, China, Europe, and North America

Author: Florence Bretelle-Establet

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2020-01-01

Total Pages: 387

ISBN-13: 303019082X

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This book has been defined around three important issues: the first sheds light on how people, in various philosophical, religious, and political contexts, understand the natural environment, and how the relationship between the environment and the body is perceived; the second focuses on the perceptions that a particular natural environment is good or bad for human health and examines the reasons behind such characterizations ; the third examines the promotion, in history, of specific practices to take advantage of the health benefits, or avoid the harm, caused by certain environments and also efforts made to change environments supposed to be harmful to human health. The feeling and/or the observation that the natural environment can have effects on human health have been, and are still commonly shared throughout the world. This led us to raise the issue of the links observed and believed to exist between human beings and the natural environment in a broad chronological and geographical framework. In this investigation, we bring the reader from ancient and late imperial China to the medieval Arab world up to medieval, modern, and contemporary Europe. This book does not examine these relationships through the prism of the knowledge of our modern contemporary European experience, which, still too often, leads to the feeling of totally different worlds. Rather, it questions protagonists who, in different times and in different places, have reflected, on their own terms, on the links between environment and health and tries to obtain a better understanding of why these links took the form they did in these precise contexts. This book targets an academic readership as well as an “informed audience”, for whom present issues of environment and health can be nourished by the reflections of the past.

Making Sense of Neuroscience in the Early Years
Making Sense of Neuroscience in the Early Years

Author: Sally Featherstone

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2017-11-16

Total Pages: 177

ISBN-13: 1472938321

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Translating research about child neuroscience into practice in education is a daunting prospect for most practitioners. In fact, many see it as fraught with difficulties and risky. However, the importance of this research has never been more important. The context of the early years in the UK, has seen considerable changes within recent years, with a raft of government regulation and guidance, and a national move to free childcare entitlement at increasingly earlier ages. Combined with a mounting pressure for accountability in 'Closing the Gap' between disadvantaged children and those more fortunate, these pressures make it fundamental that those working with young children understand what neuroscience is telling us, and more important, what it is not. Practitioners, teachers managers, and governors in settings and schools will not only be called to account for the attainment of their children, as measured in tests, but in the way children are prepared for lifelong earning, which will support them for the rest of their school lives and beyond. This book is a comprehensive position statement for practitioners that highlights: where we are now; what we know; what we don't know; what research developments mean for practitioners and setting, and how this fits in with the government expectations within the EYFS framework. Sally Featherstone covers the current thinking in educational research and neuroscience, how some of this has been misinterpreted by 'early adopters' or 'over-enthusiastic promoters', and how new information can help practitioners to be more effective in their work with young children.

Making Sense
Making Sense

Author: Bill Cope

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2020-01-30

Total Pages: 381

ISBN-13: 1107133300

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Explains the multimodal connections of text, image, space, body, sound and speech, in both old and new computer-mediated communication systems.