Bøger udgivet af MIT Press Ltd

A comprehensive overview of how civilian drones sense the world and how they build the aesthetic imaginaries of our communities.Drone technology has garnered critical attention across many fields, from engineering to the humanities. While the first wave of drone scholarship was key in initiating the debate on drones, it also privileged the idea of the “scopic regime”—a militarized regime of hypervisuality—in its analyses of the connection between vision and power. The Sensorium of the Drone and Communities broadens the drone’s spectrum of perception by acknowledging its creative, life-affirming possibility with the notion of the sensorium. The sensorium of the drone is a multimedia, synesthetic sensing assemblage in which the human agent is enmeshed with the drone. Drone sensoria can sense in many more ways than the scopic regime—with sound, touch, smell, temperature, and movement.In The Sensorium of the Drone and Communities, Kathrin Maurer shows how drone sensoria can change our understanding of human communities by constructing imaginaries of social communities based on decentralized and fluid sensing processes. Maurer takes an aesthetic approach to technology, working with two understandings of aesthetics. One understanding refers to aesthetics as a way of experiencing, and it explores how the drone-human assemblage perceives the world. The other refers to aesthetic mimetic representation, and focuses on how aesthetic drone imaginaries in literature, popular culture, visual arts, and films negotiate the sensorial technology of the drone.Bringing together key ideas in technology studies, studies of aerial views, visual and aesthetic studies, posthuman sensing, machine–human interaction, and communities, The Sensorium of the Drone and Communities sheds a welcome and necessary light on this technology’s creative potential as well as its dangers and risks.

How the West African Ebola epidemic was transformed from an urgent and distant tragedy into an existential threat to American lives—establishing the dynamics that would later dominate the US response to epidemics such as COVID-19.In 2014 and 2015, the viral Ebola epidemic in West Africa inspired breathless US media coverage and became the subject of heated public debate over just how to understand the security issue that the outbreak presented. Was it a security concern because of the lives at risk in West Africa? Or because of its threat to regional and global stability? Or was it potentially a threat to the American people? In More Than a Health Crisis, Jessica Kirk reveals how these varied positions spoke to divisions within the American public, concerning how we think about and respond to uncertainty, competing expertise, and securitization.Kirk insightfully examines how experts in different fields offered conflicting assessments of the risks posed by Ebola, and then goes on to analyze how the US press undermined the authority of the public health experts who accurately predicted that the virus posed little danger to Americans. Reading the media coverage of the Ebola epidemic as a case study in the biopolitics of fear, Kirk considers how the US response reflected not only anxieties over globalization but also long-held narratives about the “Dark Continent.” Finally, Kirk shows how the US and global public response to the Ebola outbreak challenged traditional models of securitization and identifies patterns that have tragically recurred with subsequent epidemics such as COVID-19 and monkeypox.

A deep dive into the social mind-brain, examining the processes we share with other social animals and illuminating those that are uniquely human.What Makes Us Social? is a scholarly but accessible exploration of the underlying processes that make humans the most social species on the planet. Chris and Uta Frith, pioneers in the field of cognitive neuroscience, review the many forms of social behavior that we humans share with other animals and examine the special form that only humans possess, including its dark side. These uniquely human abilities allow us to reflect on our behavior and share these reflections with other people, which in turn enables us to reason why we do things and to exert some control over our automatic behaviors. As a result, we can learn cooperatively with others and create and value cultural artifacts that survive through the generations.  Going beyond how we come to know ourselves and understand the mind of others, Frith and Frith investigate how we adapt mutually to make social interactions work. This book stands out in its application of a computational framework—one that lies at the intersection of psychology and artificial intelligence—to key concepts of social cognition, such as empathy, trust, group identity, and reputation management. Ultimately, What Makes Us Social? is a profound examination of the ways we communicate, cooperate, share, and compete with other humans and how these capabilities define us as a species.

A fresh and provocative take on typography, computing, and popular culture, viewed through four idiosyncratic typographical phenomena from the digital age.From ASCII Art to Comic Sans offers an original vision of the history of typography and computing in the digital age, viewed through the lens of offbeat typography. We often regard text as pure information and typography as a transparent art form without meaning of its own. In this book, however, Karin Wagner offers a fresh perspective that shows how text is always an image that conveys meaning, and typography, far from being meaningless, has in fact shaped modern visual and material culture in significant ways. By juxtaposing four odd typographical phenomena—the pedantic practice of ASCII art, the curious-looking machine-readable typefaces, the blurry letters of dot matrix printers, and the much-maligned font Comic Sans—Wagner paints a vivid picture of how functional technologies influence popular culture when used in ways their original creators never intended.Design practitioners, as well as fans of media, graphic design, type history, and computer technology, will enjoy this breezily sophisticated perspective on visual and digital culture. Spanning the material and visual aspects of typography from the 1960s to the present, From ASCII Art to Comic Sans is a unique contribution to the study of popular and material culture that fills a gap in the history of typography and computing.

A powerful and proven guidebook that shows organizations how to recognize racism in designed artifacts, systems, and experiences—and how to replace them with anti-racist design solutions.Anti-racist design interventions can be difficult. Well-intentioned conversations can fuel tensions, activate racialized trauma, and lead to misunderstandings, especially in spaces not typically focused on diversity, equity, and inclusion. Even when progress is made, white supremacy culture can resurface. We need anti-racist guidelines and approaches that lay bare racialized systems of oppression and fundamentally disrupt their replication. In Racism Untaught, Lisa E. Mercer and Terresa Moses, two veteran anti-racist educators, deliver this exact approach.Mercer and Moses provide a step-by-step guide to anti-racist interventions in academic, business, and community settings that benefits all participants. Adapted from their successful workshop series and filled with concrete examples and ample case studies, their book teaches participants how to analyze design—and reimagine racialized artifacts, systems, and experiences guided by anti-oppressive principles. They demonstrate how to examine positionality within the context of racism and oppression; help us understand how design can reinforce and perpetuate oppression; and reveal the unique relationship among equity, ethics, and responsibility that constitutes the core value of an anti-racist design discipline. In Racism Untaught, Mercer and Moses provide the framework we need to unlearn racialized design practices and move more generatively toward collective liberation.With a foreword by renowned designer Cheryl D. Miller, Racism Untaught is a valuable tool for anyone who wants to help themselves and their organization create an actionable and inclusive plan to dismantle racial oppression and instead realize equitable, anti-racist, and liberatory design.

An in-depth look at the urgent struggle to protect animals from harm, cruelty, injustice, extinction, and their greatest threat—us.Beloved dogs and cats. Magnificent horses and mountain gorillas. Curious chickens. What do we actually do to protect animals from harm—and is it enough? This engaging book provides a unique and eye-opening exploration of the world of animal protection as people defend diverse animals from injustice and cruelty. From the streets of major US cities to remote farms and tropical forests, Defending Animals is a gritty and moving portrait of the real work of animal protection that takes place in communities, courtrooms, and boardrooms.Globally recognized expert Kendra Coulter takes readers across the different landscapes of animal protection to meet people and animals of all kinds, from cruelty investigators to forensic veterinarians, wildlife rehabilitators and conservation leaders to animal lawyers and entrepreneurs, each working in their own ways to defend animals. Bringing unparalleled research and a distinct and nuanced analytical viewpoint, Defending Animals shows that animal protection is not only physical, intellectual, and emotional work but also a labor so rooted in empathy and care that it just might bridge the vast divide between polarized people and help create a more humane future for us all.

From entry-level to the boardroom, what works to create large-scale change in organizations looking to accelerate their diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts and reap financial benefits.Every leader endeavors to invest in and manage their key asset—talent—to be as high-performing as possible. Like a winning stock, successful diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) actions pay back over time. That dividend is paid both to the company—through not only higher performance, but talent acquisition, training, and other savings—and to society in general. In Diversity Dividend, Paola Cecchi-Dimeglio offers a fresh, detailed look at just how to realize gender and racial equity along the company-employee pathway—from attracting and interviewing applicants to onboarding, promoting, and sustaining hires—and how to remove systemic barriers at the organizational level that prevent women and underrepresented groups from advancing.  While other books have delved into DEI and the challenges inherent in sustaining successful efforts, no book has done so in concert with the depth and scope of data, basis in science, and application in the real world. In Diversity Dividend, Cecchi-Dimeglio artfully combines accessible anecdotal cases—where success was achieved or where, despite best intentions and efforts, things did not go as expected—with scientifically rigorous solutions as well as applications of data and big data. As empowering as it is comprehensive, Diversity Dividend helps remove the guesswork and near superstition that naturally arise when some methods work and others fail, thereby giving leaders the tools and insight to make informed choices at the right moments to create lasting change.

Why robots defy our existing moral and legal categories and how to revolutionize the way we think about them.Robots are a curious sort of thing. On the one hand, they are technological artifacts—and thus, things. On the other hand, they seem to have social presence, because they talk and interact with us, and simulate the capabilities commonly associated with personhood. In Person, Thing, Robot, David J. Gunkel sets out to answer the vexing question: What exactly is a robot? Rather than try to fit robots into the existing categories by way of arguing for either their reification or personification, however, Gunkel argues for a revolutionary reformulation of the entire system, developing a new moral and legal ontology for the twenty-first century and beyond.In this book, Gunkel investigates how and why efforts to use existing categories to classify robots fail, argues that “robot” designates an irreducible anomaly in the existing ontology, and formulates an alternative that restructures the ontological order in both moral philosophy and law. Person, Thing, Robot not only addresses the issues that are relevant to students, teachers, and researchers working in the fields of moral philosophy, philosophy of technology, science and technology studies (STS), and AI/robot law and policy but it also speaks to controversies that are important to AI researchers, robotics engineers, and computer scientists concerned with the social consequences of their work.

"Biography of the woman who founded pediatric cardiology and contributed to the surgical method used to save the lives of "blue (oxygen-deprived) babies.""--

A comprehensive introduction to the plastics life cycle—the impacts on our lives, our future, and our planet—and the actions we can take.Everywhere we look, we are surrounded by plastics: perhaps you have a book in one hand and your phone—made of various metals, plastics, and glass—in the other, or you are reading this on your polyurethane mattress after having flipped on a plastic light switch. In this Essential Knowledge series volume, Imari Walker-Franklin and Jenna Jambeck provide a deep exploration of the entire life of plastic things—plastics production and use, plastic waste generation and management, the environmental and societal impacts of plastics in our environment, and, finally, the policies that can help reduce pollution caused by our heavy use of plastics. One of the most current and comprehensive summaries on the subject, Plastics covers not only ocean and terrestrial plastic pollution but also the potential harms of microplastics on the human body. The authors also explain why we use plastic for so many products, how trash ends up in even the most remote corners of our world, and the alternatives and interventions that can help address our overreliance on this virtually imperishable material. As easily digestible to read as it is important, this book empowers its readers with the crucial knowledge and information they need to make thoughtful consumer choices, influence change, and spark inspiration.

A new, empathic approach to design research, drawn from the informed experiences of a leading design research program in Finland.Design, Empathy, Interpretation tells the story of empathic design, a design research program at Aalto University in Helsinki, Finland, that has developed an interpretive approach to design over the past twenty years. As one of the leaders of the Helsinki group, Ilpo Koskinen draws on his own experiences to offer readers a general intellectual and professional history of design research, and argues for what he calls an interpretive approach. Design, Empathy, Interpretation shows how the group has created connections all across the globe, and how a seemingly soft approach to design research can be useful in both industry and government.Koskinen follows design research’s transformation from questions of usability, in the 1980s, through to the revolution in personal electronics and the “user-centered” turn of the 1990s. Using the research community in Helsinki as a case study, and moving between specific projects and theoretical debates, he offers readers a focused introduction to the major methodological and intellectual challenges—as well as the opportunities—of design research. He argues that all design tasks, however simple or complex, begin with understanding the way humans ascribe meaning, both as individuals and as actors in complex societies. Thus all design research must be interpretive at its core.A new, empathic approach to design research, drawn from the informed experiences of a leading design research program in Finland.

An updated, revised, and comprehensive overview of the concepts related to cloud computing, including recent applications, innovations, and its future evolution.In this Essential Knowledge volume, Nayan B. Ruparelia provides an updated and revised version of Cloud Computing, first published in 2016, to address not only the fact that cloud computing has become a ubiquitous part of mainstream computing since then but also has made strides in other key aspects of the technology’s development, including:cloud computing’s history,updated security fundamentals that provide examples of Identity and Access Management (IAM) use that illustrate the difference between on-premise (i.e., conventional) security and cloud-based security implementation and Security Information and Event Management SIEM),an updated discussion of data migration to the cloud,a new chapter on data integrity,cloud native computing,the use of microservice design patterns,cloud automation using orchestrators and tools such as Kubernetes,a comparison of common public clouds (Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, and Amazon AWS),and a future outlook for cloud computing.An indispensable guide to cloud computing for the layperson, Cloud Computing cuts through the technical jargon and details that are irrelevant to nontechnologists, as well as the marketing hype, and explains clearly what cloud computing is, when to use it (and when not to), how to select a cloud service, how to integrate it with other technologies, and what the best practices are for its adoption.

A romance of the far future, in which humankind has relocated underground, where it is beset by monsters from another dimension—but love leads on.In the far future, humankind’s survivors huddle below Earth’s frozen surface in a pyramidal fortress-city that, for centuries now, has been under siege by loathsome “Ab-humans,” enormous slugs and spiders, and malevolent “Watching Things” from another dimension. When our unnamed protagonist receives a telepathic distress signal from a woman whom (in a previous incarnation) he’d once loved, he sallies forth on an ill-advised rescue mission—into the fiend-haunted Night Land!“Like certain rare dreams,” C. S. Lewis wrote of Hodgson’s masterpiece, The Night Land can give “sensations we never had before and enlarge our conception of the range of possible experience.” H. P. Lovecraft agreed that this is “one of the most potent pieces of macabre imagination ever written.”William Hope Hodgson (1877–1918) was an English poet, sailor, bodybuilder, and weird fiction pioneer whose horror, fantastic, and proto-sf novels—in addition to The Night Land—include The Boats of the “Glen Carrig” (1907), The House on the Borderland (1908), and The Ghost Pirates (1909). He also wrote stories in the Sargasso Sea series, the Captain Gault series, and a series about the occult detective Carnacki.

A satire set in a future England, in which a neomedievalist contest among London neighborhoods takes a disastrous turn.When Auberon Quin, a prankster nostalgic for Merrie Olde England, becomes king of that country in 1984, he mandates that each of London’s neighborhoods become an independent state, complete with unique local costumes. Everyone goes along with the conceit until young Adam Wayne, a born military tactician, takes the game too seriously . . . and becomes the Napoleon of Notting Hill. War ensues throughout the city—fought with sword and halberd!G. K. Chesterton (1874–1936) was an English author, poet, critic, and newspaper columnist known for his brilliant, epigrammatic paradoxes. His best-known character is the priest-detective Father Brown, featured in over fifty stories published between 1910 and 1936, who solves mysteries and crimes thanks to his understanding of spiritual and philosophic truths; and his best-known novel is The Man Who Was Thursday (1908), a metaphysical thriller. In addition to The Napoleon of Notting Hill, his first novel, he wrote several other near-future satires of England.

A unique exploration of teleonomy—also known as “evolved purposiveness”—as a major influence in evolution by a broad range of specialists in biology and the philosophy of science.The evolved purposiveness of living systems, termed “teleonomy” by chronobiologist Colin Pittendrigh, has been both a major outcome and causal factor in the history of life on Earth.  Many theorists have appreciated this over the years, going back to Lamarck and even Darwin in the nineteenth century. In the mid-twentieth century, however, the complex, dynamic process of evolution was simplified into the one-way, bottom-up, single gene-centered paradigm widely known as the modern synthesis. In Evolution “On Purpose,” edited by Peter A. Corning, Stuart A. Kauffman, Denis Noble, James A. Shapiro, Richard I. Vane-Wright, and Addy Pross, some twenty theorists attempt to modify this reductive approach by exploring in depth the different ways in which living systems have themselves shaped the course of evolution.Evolution “On Purpose” puts forward a more inclusive theoretical synthesis that goes far beyond the underlying principles and assumptions of the modern synthesis to accommodate work since the 1950s in molecular genetics, developmental biology, epigenetic inheritance, genomics, multilevel selection, niche construction, physiology, behavior, biosemiotics, chemical reaction theory, and other fields. In the view of the authors, active biological processes are responsible for the direction and the rate of evolution. Essays in this collection grapple with topics from the two-way “read-write” genome to cognition and decision-making in plants to the niche-construction activities of many organisms to the self-making evolution of humankind.  As this collection compellingly shows, and as bacterial geneticist James Shapiro emphasizes, “The capacity of living organisms to alter their own heredity is undeniable.”

A comprehensive history and examination of global infrastructures and the outsized role they play in our lives.Infrastructure is essential to defining how the public functions, yet there is little public knowledge regarding why and how it became today’s strongest global force over government and individual lives. Who should build and maintain infrastructures? How are they to be protected? And why are they all in such bad shape? In Lifelines of Our Society, Dirk van Laak offers broad audiences a history of global infrastructures—focused on Western societies, over the past two hundred years—that considers all their many paradoxes. He illustrates three aspects of infrastructure: their development, their influence on nation building and colonialism, and finally, how individuals internalize infrastructure and increasingly become not only its user but regulator.Beginning with public works, infrastructure in the nineteenth century carried the hope that it would facilitate world peace. Van Laak shows how, instead, it transformed to promote consumerism’s individual freedoms and our notions of work, leisure, and fulfillment. Lifelines of Our Society reveals how today’s infrastructure is both a source and a reflection of concentrated power and economic growth, which takes the form of cities under permanent construction. Symbols of power, van Laak describes, come with vulnerability, and this book illustrates the dual nature of infrastructure’s potential to hold nostalgia and inspire fear, to ease movement and govern ideas, and to bring independence to the nuclear family and control governments of the Global South.

Why games are still niche and not mainstream, and how journalism can help them gain cultural credibility.Mainstreaming and Game Journalism addresses both the history and current practice of game journalism, along with the roles writers and industry play in conveying that the medium is a “mainstream” form of entertainment. Through interviews with reporters, David B. Nieborg and Maxwell Foxman retrace how the game industry and journalists started a subcultural spiral in the 1980s that continues to this day. Digital play became increasingly exclusionary by appealing to niche audiences, relying on hardcore fans and favoring the male gamer stereotype. At the same time, this culture pushed journalists to the margins, leaving them toiling to find freelance gigs and deeply ambivalent about their profession.Mainstreaming and Game Journalism also examines the bumpy process of what we think of as “mainstreaming.” The authors argue that it encompasses three overlapping factors. First, for games to become mainstream, they need to become more ubiquitous through broader media coverage. Second, an increase in ludic literacy, or how-to play games, determines whether that greater visibility translates into accessibility. Third, the mainstreaming of games must gain cultural legitimacy. The fact that games are more visible does little if only a few people take them seriously or deem them worthy of attention. Ultimately, Mainstreaming and Game Journalism provocatively questions whether games ever will—or even should—gain widespread cultural acceptance.

A provocative look at the unconscious mind that challenges contemporary perceptions and exposes the indefensible science that fostered them.How much of a role does the unconscious play in our decision making? In Open Minded: Searching for Truth about the Unconscious Mind, authors Ben R. Newell and David R. Shanks would argue: not very much. Behavioral science and public discourse have placed an outsized emphasis on the unconscious mind when it comes to understanding human behavior. Pursuing trails of fraud, intrigue, and claims about the power of unconscious thought, Newell and Shanks scrutinize the science that has contributed to our conventional wisdom and offer an important counterpoint to the ever-stronger traction that the unconscious mind has gained in public debate, such as the now ubiquitous claim that unconscious bias plays a large role in people’s decisions and behavior.Open Minded is divided into two sections: the first examines the modern understanding of the conscious mind, and the second shifts the focus to how to reform current research. Focusing on the core processes of decision making, Newell and Shanks cut through many questionable claims about unconscious behavior. Then, they delve into the nuts-and-bolts of methodology, challenging not only psychology and the behavioral sciences but also medicine and science more broadly. In this against-the-grain approach, Newell and Shanks chart new possibilities for how we may be more open to understanding how our minds actually work.

An exploration of the Green Belt conservation project between the former East and West Germanies and its relationship to emergent ecosystems, trauma, and memorialization.The first book-length scholarly treatment of Germany’s largest conservation project, the Green Belt, Mnemonic Ecologies by Sonja Pieck presents a new interdisciplinary approach: that effective restoration and conservation of wounded land must merge ecology with memory. Since the Cold War’s end in 1989, German conservationists have transformed the once militarized border between East and West Germany into an extensive protected area. Yet as forests, meadows, and wetlands replace fences, minefields, and guard towers, ecological recovery must reckon with the pain of the borderlands’ brutal past. The lessons gained by conservationists here, Pieck argues, have profound practical and ethical implications far beyond Germany.Can conservation help heal both ecological and societal wounds? How might conservation honor difficult socioecological pasts? Deeply researched and evocatively written, this beautiful, interdisciplinary investigation into the legacy of war and nature’s resurgence blends environmental history, ethics, geography, and politics with ecology and memory studies. Amid our rampant biodiversity crisis, Mnemonic Ecologies shows why conservation must include humanized landscapes in its purview, thus helping to craft a new conservation ethos that is collaborative, empathetic, and more sensitive to the connections between humans and the places they inhabit.

A deep dive into practical game design through playful philosophy and philosophical play.What are video games made of? And what can that tell us about what they mean? In The Stuff Games Are Made Of, experimental game maker Pippin Barr explores the materials of video game design. Taking the reader on a deep dive into eight case studies of his own games, Barr illuminates the complex nature of video games and video game design and the possibilities both offer for exploring ideas big and small.Through a variety of engaging and approachable examples, Barr shows how every single aspect of a game—whether it is code, graphics, interface, or even time itself—can be designed with and related to the player experience. Barr’s experimental approach, with its emphasis on highly specific elements of games, will leave readers armed with intriguing design philosophy, conceptual rigor, and diverse insights into the inner life of video games. Upon finishing this book, readers will be ready to think deeply about the nature of games, to dive into expressive and experimental game design themselves, or simply to play with a new and expanded mindset.

The third edition of a leading text on the microeconomic foundations of banking, comprehensively updated with new coverage of the 2008 Global Financial Crisis, fintech, and the latest research in banking theory.The banking industry has undergone seismic change in the twenty-first century, from the overhaul of regulation in the wake of the 2008 Global Financial Crisis to the digitalization of the economy and the disruption of traditional business models by ascendant tech giants. Now in a comprehensively updated third edition, this essential graduate-level text on the microeconomic foundations of banking provides the rigorous theoretical approach required to understand these new structures and norms, functioning as a user’s guide to recent academic literature. Microeconomics of Banking offers a comprehensive view of the evolution of banking theory and the rapidly changing realm of financial intermediation, examining the central issues and offering the necessary tools for understanding how they have been modeled. New edition highlights:Up-to-date coverage of the latest research in banking theory as well as the events of the global financial crisis and resultant Basel III regulatory frameworkNew chapters on liquidity and systemic riskNew material throughout on cryptocurrencies, fintech, and other facets of a digitalized economy

The fascinating story of glutamate, the neurotransmitter that controls the structure and function of the brain in health and neurological disorders.Sculptor and Destroyer tells the story of a simple, little-known molecule that became a master architect and commander of the human brain: glutamate. Upward of 90 percent of the neurons in the human brain deploy glutamate as their neurotransmitter. Other neurotransmitters can only exert their effects on brain function by subtly modifying the ongoing activity of glutamatergic neurons, but during brain development glutamate controls the growth of dendrites and the formation of synapses. In this eye-opening book, Mark Mattson explains how the neurotransmitter glutamate controls the structure and function of neuronal networks in the brain, thereby mediating the brain’s capabilities, including learning and memory, creativity, and imagination.Mattson also delves deeply into the dark side of glutamate, which he calls the “destroyer” side. He shows how relatively subtle aberrancies in the activity of neurons that deploy glutamate may result in behavioral disorders ranging from autism and schizophrenia to chronic anxiety and depression. More dramatically, he describes how glutamate can excite neurons to death, a process that occurs in epilepsy and stroke and, perhaps even more insidiously, in Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, ALS, and Huntington’s disease. Sculptor and Destroyer concludes with a perspective on how knowledge of glutamate’s roles in neuroplasticity might be applied to the optimization of brain health throughout our lives.Written in engaging, approachable prose, Sculptor and Destroyer will be of interest to anyone in the fields of neuroscience, neurology, psychiatry, and psychology, as well as to anyone with a curiosity about the human brain.

An intellectual history of the social sciences that offers a library of 101 books that broke new ground for the field.What are the social sciences? What unifies them? This essay collection seeks to answer these and other important questions as it considers how the field has developed over the years, from post–World War II in France to the present day throughout the world. Edited by Cyril Lemieux, Laurent Berger, Marielle Macé, Gildas Salmon, and Cécile Vidal, A History of the Social Sciences in 101 Books brings together a diverse range of researchers in the social sciences to present short essays on 101 books—both renowned and lesser known—that have shaped the field, from Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947) to Michel Aglietta’s Money: 5000 Years of Debt and Power (2016).While there have been surveys and intellectual histories of particular disciplines within the social sciences (history, anthropology, sociology), until now there has been no intellectual history of the social sciences as a unified whole. Far from presenting a fixed and frozen canon, A History of the Social Sciences in 101 Books offers instead a moving, multiform landscape with no settled questions, only an ongoing series of new perspectives and challenges to previously established grounding.

An essay collection exploring the board game’s relationship to the built environment, revealing the unexpected ways that play reflects perceptions of space.Board games harness the creation of entirely new worlds. From the medieval warlord to the modern urban planner, players are permitted to inhabit a staggering variety of roles, and are prompted to incorporate preexisting notions of placemaking into their decisions. To what extent do board games represent the social context of their production? How might they reinforce or subvert normative ideas of community and fulfillment? In Playing Place, Chad Randl and D. Medina Lasansky have curated a collection of 37 fascinating essays, supplemented by a rich trove of photo illustrations, that unpack these questions with breadth and care.Although board games are often recreational objects, their mythologies and infrastructure do not exist in a vacuum—rather, they echo and reproduce prevalent cultural landscapes. This thesis forms the throughline of pieces reflecting on subjects as diverse as the rigidly gendered fantasies of classic mass-market games; the imperial convictions embedded in games that position player-protagonists as conquerors establishing dominion over their “discoveries”; and even the uncanny prescience of games that have players responding to a global pandemic. Representing a thrilling convergence of historiography, architectural history, and media studies scholarship, Playing Place suggests not only that tabletop games should be taken seriously but also that the medium itself is uniquely capable of facilitating our critical consideration of structures that are often taken for granted.

The first English translation of the French cult classic that lampoons France’s most popular intellectuals of the post-1968 period and their ideas, which became forces of counterrevolution.Eric-John Russell’s translation of Jaime Semprún’s brutal takedown of France’s best-known intellectuals of the post-1968 period, A Gallery of Recuperation, is one of the first full English versions of any of Semprún’s books. Originally titled Précis de recuperation, the book is a scathing critique of ten major thinkers, including Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Jean-François Lyotard, and Cornelius Castoriadis. Semprún uses this catalog of careerism to reflect on the concept of recuperation—capitalism’s uncanny ability to coopt anticapitalist critiques and subvert subversion. His central question: What happens to revolutionary ideas, including Marxism itself, in the hands of professional intellectuals?Semprún’s idiosyncratic and playful style of polemics takes existentialism, humanism, structuralism, poststructuralism, postmodernism, aesthetics, and psychoanalysis to task, casting new light on the figures who have become dominant staples of modern Anglophone academia, and proving the necessity of critiquing intellectuals’ roles within contemporary capitalism. A cult classic among the French radical left and scholars of the Situationist International and May 1968, A Gallery of Recuperation never made the impact it should have. Russell’s translation marks a major step in recognizing Semprún’s work beyond its French context.

A fundamental critique of the current property regime, calling for radical social and political change.In The Abuse of Property, Daniel Loick offers a multifaceted philosophical critique of the concept of property, broadly understood. He argues that property should not be the dominant framework in which human beings regulate the use of things, that property is not the same as use. Property rights, in his view, are not conditions of freedom or justice, but deficient, dysfunctional, and harmful ways of interacting with other people and the natural environment. He dissects not only the classic justifications of property (from John Locke's justification of property as a natural right based on individual freedom to Hegel's justification of property as a form of mutual recognition) but also the classic critiques of property, from Proudhon and Marx up to Adorno and Agamben.Through an innovative critical approach to legal studies, Loick demonstrates how the concept of property, historically applied to things and people and still a linchpin of our distorted relation with the world, forms a direct line from the Occupy movement to Black Lives Matter and beyond.

An exploration of historical memory and networks of meaning in the context of today’s crises of extremism and polarization.As authoritarianism continues to rise around the world, the stories we tell ourselves about what has happened and what is happening become ever more relevant. In Memory, Edited, Abby Smith Rumsey examines collective memory, how it binds us, and how it can be used by bad actors to manipulate us. Bringing forward the voices of a rich cast of Eastern European artists from the past two hundred years—from Fyodor Dostoevsky to Gerhard Richter—Rumsey shows how their work and lives illustrate the devastation wrought by regimes dependent on entrenched lies to survive. Not only does this hijacking of the narrative polarize communities, but it also hijacks our future.Through an interdisciplinary lens that includes the best thinking from history, the arts, cognitive science, psychology, and political philosophy, Rumsey lays bare our narratives, showing how they are constructed and how they have changed over time. Ever-aware of resisting the false promise of utopia, Rumsey argues that only by confronting the past and reckoning with the crimes that were committed can we ever hope to heal and gain self-knowledge. Memory, Edited is an indispensable text for anyone who cares about democracy, equality, and freedom in our current age of crisis.

A breathtaking history of America’s trail-blazing female science journalists—and the timely lessons they can teach us about equity, access, collaboration, and persistence.Writing for Their Lives tells the stories of women who pioneered the nascent profession of science journalism from the 1920s through the 1950s. Like the “hidden figures” of science, such as Dorothy Vaughan and Katherine Johnson, these women journalists, Marcel Chotkowski LaFollette writes, were also overlooked in traditional histories of science and journalism. But, at a time when science, medicine, and the mass media were expanding dramatically, Emma Reh, Jane Stafford, Marjorie Van de Water, and many others were explaining theories, discoveries, and medical advances to millions of readers via syndicated news stories, weekly columns, weekend features, and books—and they deserve the recognition they have long been denied.Grounded in extensive archival research and enlivened by passages of original correspondence, Writing for Their Lives addresses topics such as censorship, peer review, and news embargoes, while also providing intimate glimpses into the personal lives and adventures of mid-twentieth-century career women. They were single, married, or divorced; mothers with child-care responsibilities; daughters supporting widowed mothers; urban dwellers who lived through, and wrote about, the Great Depression, World War II, and the dawn of the Atomic Age—all the while, daring to challenge the arrogance and misogyny of the male scientific community in pursuit of information that could serve the public.Written at a time when trust in science is at a premium, Writing for Their Lives is an inspiring untold history that underscores just how crucial dedicated, conscientious journalists are to the public understanding and acceptance of scientific guidance and expertise.