Relating with More-than-Humans
Relating with More-than-Humans

Author: Jean Chamel

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2023-01-30

Total Pages: 264

ISBN-13: 3031102940

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Within the social sciences, other-than-human being’s agency has often been denied and interbeings relationships have not been fully addressed. However, many indigenous worldviews and Western contemporary spiritual practices are shaping a very different reality, with various attempts to share the world with non-human beings, animate or inanimate, creating forms of relationships to “the living”. This edited volume documents how humans deal with non-human entities in a large variety of cultural contexts. It focuses on ritual processes and how ritual creativity is mobilised to invent new ways of relating with more-than-humans. Comprising nine case studies, the volume is divided into three main sections that address successively daily interactions, political implications, and spiritual engagements. Cooperative interactions, kinship relations, senses of belonging, traditional healing techniques, non-human beings’ legal personality attribution, transformative experiences, and phenomenological relationalities are examined in various locations: West Africa, Buryatia, Estonia, Finland, France, Mexico, Nepalese Himalayas, Sweden and Wales. Chapters "Relating with More-than-Humans: Interbeing Rituality and Spiritual Practices in a Living World—An Introduction" and "Ritual Animism: Indigenous Performances, Interbeings Ceremonies and Alternative Spiritualities in the Global Rights of Nature Networks" are available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.

More-Than-Human Choreography
More-Than-Human Choreography

Author: Moritz Frischkorn

Publisher: transcript Verlag

Published: 2023-08-31

Total Pages: 261

ISBN-13: 3839464501

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In the global context of the Great Acceleration, things and people have been on the move more than ever before. Moritz Frischkorn takes a fresh look at recent performing arts practices that deal with everyday objects on and beyond the stage. Contrasting these practices with the business field of logistics, he examines the aesthetic and ethical concerns of moving things. Drawing on concepts from performance as well as Black studies and philosophy, and based on an artistic-research methodology, the book formulates a notion of more-than-human choreography as an ecologically informed, infinitely indebted practice of living within the material world.

The City Is More Than Human
The City Is More Than Human

Author: Frederick L. Brown

Publisher: University of Washington Press

Published: 2016-10-03

Total Pages: 353

ISBN-13: 0295999357

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Winner of the 2017 Virginia Marie Folkins Award, Association of King County Historical Organizations (AKCHO) Winner of the 2017 Hal K. Rothman Book Prize, Western History Association Seattle would not exist without animals. Animals have played a vital role in shaping the city from its founding amid existing indigenous towns in the mid-nineteenth century to the livestock-friendly town of the late nineteenth century to the pet-friendly, livestock-averse modern city. When newcomers first arrived in the 1850s, they hastened to assemble the familiar cohort of cattle, horses, pigs, chickens, and other animals that defined European agriculture. This, in turn, contributed to the dispossession of the Native residents of the area. However, just as various animals were used to create a Euro-American city, the elimination of these same animals from Seattle was key to the creation of the new middle-class neighborhoods of the twentieth century. As dogs and cats came to symbolize home and family, Seattleites’ relationship with livestock became distant and exploitative, demonstrating the deep social contradictions that characterize the modern American metropolis. Throughout Seattle’s history, people have sorted animals into categories and into places as a way of asserting power over animals, other people, and property. In The City Is More Than Human, Frederick Brown explores the dynamic, troubled relationship humans have with animals. In so doing he challenges us to acknowledge the role of animals of all sorts in the making and remaking of cities.

Social
Social

Author: Matthew D. Lieberman

Publisher: Crown

Published: 2013-10-08

Total Pages: 390

ISBN-13: 0307889114

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We are profoundly social creatures--more than we know. In Social, renowned psychologist Matthew Lieberman explores groundbreaking research in social neuroscience revealing that our need to connect with other people is even more fundamental, more basic, than our need for food or shelter. Because of this, our brain uses its spare time to learn about the social world--other people and our relation to them. It is believed that we must commit 10,000 hours to master a skill. According to Lieberman, each of us has spent 10,000 hours learning to make sense of people and groups by the time we are ten. Social argues that our need to reach out to and connect with others is a primary driver behind our behavior. We believe that pain and pleasure alone guide our actions. Yet, new research using fMRI--including a great deal of original research conducted by Lieberman and his UCLA lab--shows that our brains react to social pain and pleasure in much the same way as they do to physical pain and pleasure. Fortunately, the brain has evolved sophisticated mechanisms for securing our place in the social world. We have a unique ability to read other people’s minds, to figure out their hopes, fears, and motivations, allowing us to effectively coordinate our lives with one another. And our most private sense of who we are is intimately linked to the important people and groups in our lives. This wiring often leads us to restrain our selfish impulses for the greater good. These mechanisms lead to behavior that might seem irrational, but is really just the result of our deep social wiring and necessary for our success as a species. Based on the latest cutting edge research, the findings in Social have important real-world implications. Our schools and businesses, for example, attempt to minimalize social distractions. But this is exactly the wrong thing to do to encourage engagement and learning, and literally shuts down the social brain, leaving powerful neuro-cognitive resources untapped. The insights revealed in this pioneering book suggest ways to improve learning in schools, make the workplace more productive, and improve our overall well-being.

Participatory Research in More-than-Human Worlds
Participatory Research in More-than-Human Worlds

Author: Michelle Bastian

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-12-01

Total Pages: 349

ISBN-13: 1317340876

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Socio-environmental crises are currently transforming the conditions for life on this planet, from climate change, to resource depletion, biodiversity loss and long-term pollutants. The vast scale of these changes, affecting land, sea and air have prompted calls for the ‘ecologicalisation’ of knowledge. This book adopts a much needed ‘more-than-human’ framework to grasp these complexities and challenges. It contains multidisciplinary insights and diverse methodological approaches to question how to revise, reshape and invent methods in order to work with non-humans in participatory ways. The book offers a framework for thinking critically about the promises and potentialities of participation from within a more-than-human paradigm, and opens up trajectories for its future development. It will be of interest to those working in the environmental humanities, animal studies, science and technology studies, ecology, and anthropology.

Reimagining Sustainability in Precarious Times
Reimagining Sustainability in Precarious Times

Author: Karen Malone

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2017-01-17

Total Pages: 332

ISBN-13: 9811025509

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This book reflects the considerable appeal of the Anthropocene and the way it stimulates new discussions and ideas for reimagining sustainability and its place in education in these precarious times. The authors explore these new imaginings for sustainability using varying theoretical perspectives in order to consider innovative ways of engaging with concepts that are now influencing the field of sustainability and education. Through their theoretical analysis, research and field work, the authors explore novel approaches to designing sustainability and sustainability education. These approaches, although diverse in focus, all highlight the complex interdependencies of the human and more-than-human world, and by unpacking binaries such as human/nature, nature/culture, subject/object and de-centring the human expose the complexities of an entangled human-nature relation that are shaping our understanding of sustainability. These messy relations challenge the well-versed mantras of anthropocentric exceptionalism in sustainability and sustainability education and offer new questions rather than answers for researchers, educators, and practitioners to explore. As working with new theoretical lenses is not always easy, this book also highlights the authors’ methods for approaching these ideas and imaginings.

Design For More-Than-Human Futures
Design For More-Than-Human Futures

Author: Martín Tironi

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2023-09-18

Total Pages: 208

ISBN-13: 1000954765

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This book explores the work of important authors in the search for a transition towards more ethical design focused on more-than-human coexistence. In a time of environmental crises in which the human species threatens its own survival and the highest level of exacerbation of the idea of a future and technological innovation, it is important to discard certain anthropocentric categories in order to situate design beyond the role that it traditionally held in the capitalist world, creating opportunities to create more just and sustainable worlds. This book is an invitation to travel new paths for design framed by ethics of more-than-human coexistence that breaks with the unsustainability installed in the designs that outfit our lives. Questioning the notion of human-centered design is central to this discussion. It is not only a theoretical and methodological concern, but an ethical need to critically rethink the modern, colonialist, and anthropocentric inheritance that resonates in design culture. The authors in this book explore the ideas oriented to form new relations with the more-than-human and with the planet, using design as a form of political enquiry. This book will be of interest to academics and students from the world of design and particularly those involved in emerging branches of the field such as speculative design, critical design, non-anthropocentric design, and design for transition.

Research Handbook on Artificial Intelligence and Communication
Research Handbook on Artificial Intelligence and Communication

Author: Seungahn Nah

Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing

Published: 2023-11-03

Total Pages: 453

ISBN-13: 1803920300

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This forward-looking Research Handbook makes an insightful contribution to the emerging field of studies on communication of, by and with AI. Bringing together state-of-the-art research from over 50 leading international scholars across various fields, it provides a comprehensive overview of the complex intersections between AI and communication.

Teaching Climate Change in the United States
Teaching Climate Change in the United States

Author: Joseph Henderson

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2020-03-23

Total Pages: 206

ISBN-13: 0429603789

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This book highlights best practices in climate change education through the analysis of a rich collection of case studies that showcase educational programs across the United States. Framed against the political backdrop of a country in which climate change denial presents a significant threat to global action for mitigation and adaptation, each case study examines the various strategies employed by those working in this increasingly challenging sociopolitical environment. Via co-authored chapters written by educational researchers and climate change education practitioners in conversation with one another, a wide range of education programs is represented. These range from traditional institutions such as K-12 schools and universities to the contemporary learning environments of museums and environmental education centres. The role of mass media and community-level educational initiatives is also examined. The authors cover a multitude of topics, including the challenge of multi-stakeholder projects, tensions between indigenous knowledge and scientific research, education for youth activism, and professional learning. By telling stories of success and failure from the field, this book provides climate change researchers and educators with tools to help them navigate increasingly rough and rising waters.

Teaching the Whole Student
Teaching the Whole Student

Author: David Schoem

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2023-07-03

Total Pages: 278

ISBN-13: 1000981649

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Published in association with Teaching the Whole Student is a compendium of engaged teaching approaches by faculty across disciplines. These inspiring authors offer models for instructors who care deeply about their students, respect and recognize students’ social identities and lived experiences, and are interested in creating community and environments of openness and trust to foster deep-learning, academic success, and meaning-making.The authors in this volume stretch the boundaries of academic learning and the classroom experience by seeking to identify the space between subject matter and a student's core values and prior knowledge. They work to find the interconnectedness of knowledge, understanding, meaning, inquiry and truth. They appreciate that students bring their full lives and experiences—their heart and spirit—into the classroom just as they bring their minds and intellectual inquiry. These approaches contribute to student learning and the core academic purposes of higher education, help students find meaning and purpose in their lives, and help strengthen our diverse democracy through students’ active participation and leadership in civic life. They also have a demonstrated impact on critical and analytical thinking, student retention and academic success, personal well-being, commitments to civic engagement, diversity, and social justice.Topics discussed:• Teacher-student relationships and community building• How teaching the whole student increases persistence and completion rates• How an open learning environment fosters critical understanding• Strategies for developing deep social and personal reflection in experiential education and service learningThe authors of this book remind us in poignant and empirical ways of the importance of teaching the whole student, as the book's title reflects.