Goldsmith's press gb (92 risultati)

Paperback. Condizione: New. An antiracist theory of cleaning.In Making the World Clean: Wasted Lives, Wasted Environment, and Racial Capitalism, Françoise Vergès examines the racial and gendered politics of wasting lands, bodies, and resources and the organized deprivation of clean water, shelter, and access to health services-in other words, the structural denial, along racial lines, of vital needs. Through 38 short sections, she looks at the social relations that have made cleaning into drudgery and into a racialized, gendered, poorly paid job that is nevertheless necessary for any society to function. She concludes with the proposition of a feminist, decolonial, antiracist, anti-patriarchal, and anti-capitalist politics of cleaning. Or, simply put, of "decolonial cleaning."To Vergès, the structural denial of the elemental needs of women of color (sanitary pads, access to water, and privacy for basic washing), and why these needs are considered insignificant and trivial, shows how racism and class war are gendered. By examining the banal, the trivial, and the elemental, the author addresses cleaning as a necessity rather than the maintenance of a consumerist lifestyle, a condition of basic care of the body and the mind that is considered with indifference by racial capitalism, white environmentalism, and even, too often, by humanitarian organizations. She argues that by building "life-affirming institutions," as Ruth Wilson Gilmore advocates, struggles against the whitening of cleaning create sites of freedom. "Decolonial cleaning" imagines cleaning as taking care of land, humans, plants, animals, and rivers, not seeking to discipline them or transform them into commodities or objects of conservation but cleaning as a practice dedicated to sustaining the living world. …

Paperback. Condizione: New. Britain, 2057. Drought has left a trail of inexplicable parch marks around the long-dry riverbed of an ancient massacre site. TV archaeologist Eva Sinclair, struggling to evade violence in a future York riven by political tension and protest, seeks to understand what links these fern-like patterns with a Bronze Age community that also once faced the ravages of climate change. Even more concerningly - why are these same patterns appearing in the form of rashes on her skin, and those of others involved in the excavation?Eva Sinclair is struggling after an extramarital affair leaves her broke and dealing with a festering media scandal. She jumps at the chance to head to York to join an excavation of a unique Bronze Age site in the seceded North of England. Of particular interest are the highly atypical and mysterious parch marks in the shape of coiling ferns that lie alongside a harrowing, ancient mass grave. Eva is fascinated, but with protests becoming ever more violent in the wake of drought and water rationing, she finds loyalty to her colleagues conflicting with personal ambition.1,300 BC. Ray is known in her village to have the Sense - the ability to feel the presence of the Serpent of the River, the Woman of the Spring, the Boar and all the other spirits that allow her and her community to survive and thrive. Plummeting temperatures and a series of failed harvests, however, have left them flailing. When a powerful tribe from the south arrives to seek hospitality and the healing powers of the Spring, Ray is left feeling she would be better off blessed with the ability to control the more emotionally incontinent members of her clan.…

Paperback. Condizione: New. In an epic novel set on the North Pennine Moors, Elizabeth has abandoned avalanche science to restore desolate peatlands. She treks in the footsteps of Isabel who, five centuries earlier, herds her cattle to remote summering grounds.Both are reeling from the overwhelming crises of their day. In 1548, Isabel and her father, together with the priest in this poorest of parishes, grapple with the chaos of the protestant reformation. Today, a grieving Elizabeth fights to save an invaluable ecosystem, one that is threatened by wilful fire-raising and arson.The entwined stories are told through multiple voices creating a rich portrait of England's most remote landscape. At its heart, this deeply moving novel interrogates how society confronts crisis whether through science, faith or superstitIon.…

Paperback. Condizione: New. 14 powerful stories spanning post-apocalyptic futures to the paleolithic past, exploring female resilience across speculative and realist landscapesIn "Maybe the Birds," A.J. Ashworth weaves together narratives that are both deeply human and imaginatively bold, each story examining what it means to be alive when the world is no longer as it used to be.The collection showcases Ashworth's range, featuring a young female vampire who uses her knowledge of mirrors to save her village from her creator, and a woman grappling with the unsettling feeling that the robins she has always cherished are no longer her allies. These narratives, largely speculative in nature, are grounded in universal themes of love and loss, family bonds and betrayals, and the profound moments of disconnection and connection that define our closest relationships.Featuring "Leather" from Best British Short Stories, this is Ashworth's second short story collection. Her work has garnered critical acclaim for its unique blend of speculative elements with deeply realistic emotional landscapes, creating stories that feel both otherworldly and intimately familiar.…

Paperback. Condizione: New. An antiracist theory of cleaning.In Making the World Clean: Wasted Lives, Wasted Environment, and Racial Capitalism, Françoise Vergès examines the racial and gendered politics of wasting lands, bodies, and resources and the organized deprivation of clean water, shelter, and access to health services-in other words, the structural denial, along racial lines, of vital needs. Through 38 short sections, she looks at the social relations that have made cleaning into drudgery and into a racialized, gendered, poorly paid job that is nevertheless necessary for any society to function. She concludes with the proposition of a feminist, decolonial, antiracist, anti-patriarchal, and anti-capitalist politics of cleaning. Or, simply put, of "decolonial cleaning."To Vergès, the structural denial of the elemental needs of women of color (sanitary pads, access to water, and privacy for basic washing), and why these needs are considered insignificant and trivial, shows how racism and class war are gendered. By examining the banal, the trivial, and the elemental, the author addresses cleaning as a necessity rather than the maintenance of a consumerist lifestyle, a condition of basic care of the body and the mind that is considered with indifference by racial capitalism, white environmentalism, and even, too often, by humanitarian organizations. She argues that by building "life-affirming institutions," as Ruth Wilson Gilmore advocates, struggles against the whitening of cleaning create sites of freedom. "Decolonial cleaning" imagines cleaning as taking care of land, humans, plants, animals, and rivers, not seeking to discipline them or transform them into commodities or objects of conservation but cleaning as a practice dedicated to sustaining the living world. …

Paperback. Condizione: New. A near-future real-life society transitions to a post-capitalist, post-climate change reality.The Department Of What It (Really) Means To Be Human is a thoughtful, optimistic scifi novel set in a near-future Aotearoa New Zealand where an investigator navigates a newly post-capitalist world in their search for a missing artist.When the world changed, Emerald Hutson closed the door on their old life. Now they're a freelance investigator for the Grants and Stipends Office, augmenting basic income with cases that are both simple and easily resolved. Until they're assigned to track down Gen Ecks, a notable installation artist who's fallen off the map.When Em finds Gen, she's under the influence of Moneta, a drug designed to let users experience memories as if they were real. Em's inclined to declare their case closed and leave Gen to it. Most drug use has been decriminalized, and while Gen's art might be suffering, there's no reason to intervene if Gen wants to use Moneta. But the drug isn't working as expected. Gen's not just going down memory lane, she's completely lost, unable to tell past from present. And she may not be the only one.To help Gen and expose Moneta's dangers, Em cracks open old doors, beginning with an old colleague who's been keeping an unsettlingly close eye on them. And in the process Em learns that while they may have been happy to take advantage of the world's shift to start anew, neither they nor the world can be truly changed until they face the past head on.…

Paperback. Condizione: New. In an epic novel set on the North Pennine Moors, Elizabeth has abandoned avalanche science to restore desolate peatlands. She treks in the footsteps of Isabel who, five centuries earlier, herds her cattle to remote summering grounds.Both are reeling from the overwhelming crises of their day. In 1548, Isabel and her father, together with the priest in this poorest of parishes, grapple with the chaos of the protestant reformation. Today, a grieving Elizabeth fights to save an invaluable ecosystem, one that is threatened by wilful fire-raising and arson.The entwined stories are told through multiple voices creating a rich portrait of England's most remote landscape. At its heart, this deeply moving novel interrogates how society confronts crisis whether through science, faith or superstitIon.…

Paperback. Condizione: New. A coming to terms with marriage and career, the life-long impact of a father's alcoholism, and an aunt's insistent example to live an unroofed life."I had gone to the common under the vague impression that I wished to recapture something of a life I no longer possessed."Following his aunt Abilene's death, Robert travels from Manchester to Hampshire to settle her estate. Instead of fulfilling his executor duties, he impulsively builds a hut on nearby Ludshott Common and stays for seven days. This introspective novel explores his week in nature as he grapples with loss, disillusionment, marriage, career, parenthood, white male privilege, and his father's alcoholism.Blending fiction, auto-fiction, and place writing, Common is a novel about solitude, connection, and the fragile peace we attempt to make with ourselves-a portrait ofrenewal, reckoning, and the frequently failed attempt to reconnect with both past legacies and present realities.…

Paperback. Condizione: New. A group of Victorian women, shipwrecked on an island in a parallel universe, fight ffor change.Thirty "surplus" mothers from asylums, workhouses, and the streets of Victorian England are shipwrecked on an island in an alternate universe. To survive, they must create a new society amid the lethal black sands and mysterious beasts. How will they shake off the patriarchal chains that bound them and raise their children to be free? How will Betty, who longs to be back under the guidance of her master, survive, as the community evolves? And who is watching them? Told by multiple narrators, the novel imagines an alternative history: one free of patriarchy, which affords the characters a chance to redefine their gender roles and those of their children, whilst speculating on the conditions necessary for them to evolve.…

Paperback. Condizione: New. Women have always worked in technology, engineering, mathematics, and medicine. Sometimes they made important discoveries and breakthroughs; sometimes theysimply managed to exist and persist despite endless obstacles and a criminal lack of acknowledgment. Carefully researched, thoughtful, pitch perfect and precise, these poems about historical women scientists are hilarious and heart-breaking at the same time. There are women here whose names you may know (Rachel Carson, Mae Jemison, Hedy Lamarr, Ada Lovelace, Beatrix Potter) and others you probably don't (TapputiBelatekallim, June Bacon-Bercey, Eugenie Clark, Beatrice Medicine, Gladys West). Randall has a fine-tuned knack for metaphor and plain language, and her poetry unpicks injustice alongside complex scientific ideas. If you've seen Randall's poems in Scientific American, Analog, or Asimov's Science Fiction, you may already have been drawn into these extraordinary stories. Illustrated with portraits by NASA artist Kristin DiVona, these poems will resonate with scientists, feminists, thinkers, learners, philosophers, poets, and truth-seekers young, old and everywhere in between. DiVona, Kristin (illustratore).…

Paperback. Condizione: New. Shortlisted for Best Collection in The British Science Fiction Association Awards The lives of people (mostly women) who help to produce science or who are affected by it. The stories in Schrödinger's Wife (and Other Possibilities) travel through laboratories, observatories, rockets, hotel rooms, hospitals, out to the Antarctic and into outer space, following the trails of women scientists, technicians, patients, doctors, and spouses in their encounters with some of the most extraordinary aspects of modern science.In these science-inspired tales the nuclear physicist Lise Meitner discovers the secrets of nuclear fission while fleeing from the Nazis. An employee in the underground laboratory CERN refuses to have her own photo taken. The biologist Margaret Bastock must figure our the impact of genes on behavior while coping with post-war expectations of women's own behavior. Scientists from East and West Germany stationed at opposite sides of Antarctica experience their own fall of the Berlin Wall. The elusive physicist Bruno Pontecorvo theorizes about an equally elusive particle. Schrödinger's wife Anny uses his theory to get her revenge on her philandering husband. A scientific theory worries about being discovered by a woman, and a resident in a special institution extrapolates the history of the universe from a piece of toast. In this, her second collection of short stories, Pippa Goldschmidt explores the lives of real and imaginary scientists, focusing on the human emotions and social connections behind the discoveries. …

Paperback. Condizione: New. A novel about the dark gifts of grief, what it means to belong, and the possibility that time and space may not be what we think they are.It is the morning following a devastating hurricane on England's south coast, and local painter Dolores is walking the shingle beach of the Headland. She spots something unusual lurking in a piece of driftwood-a color, a creature, perhaps something fostered by the twin forces of storm and atomic fallout. It's all anyone has been talking about, after all, just months after Chernobyl and in the shadow of the local nuclear power station.Decades later, her son Morgan returns to the Headland to arrange for Dolores' funeral. The power station is about to be decommissioned, and the bleak landscape is best known now as a landing point for desperate immigrants from across the Channel. Morgan's girlfriend is pregnant-an unexpected revelation that he is not at all sure about-and he is especially keen to discover what he can from his mother's unusual cottage, especially about his father, whom he has never known. He uncovers the diary his mother wrote following the hurricane. It tells a story about Dolores and the strange being she discovers on the beach-a story which is both enthralling and heartrending. As he reads the journal, Morgan's own experiences of the Headland become increasingly inexplicable. The journal challenges Morgan's ideas about love and grief, parenthood and belonging, and the very fabric of time. As he unravels the mysteries of his mother's past, he must come to terms with his own origins and face the growing violence from those who would threaten the peace of the Headland.…

Paperback. Condizione: New. A carefully researched, emotional and hilarious collection of poems about historical women in the fields of science, technology, engineering, mathematics and medicine.Hilarious, heart-breaking, and perfectly pitched, these carefully-researched poems about historical women in science, technology, engineering, mathematics, and medicine will bring you to both laughter and outrage in just a few lines. A wickedly funny, feminist take on the lives and work of women who resisted their parents, their governments, the rules and conventions of their times, and sometimes situations as insidious as a lack of a women's bathroom in a college science building.Discover seashells by the seashore alongside Mary Anning and learn how Elizabeth Blackwell lost her eye. Read about Bertha Pallan's side hustle in the circus, Honor Fell bringing a ferret to her sister's wedding, Annie Jump Cannon cataloguing stars, Mary G. Ross stumping the panel on "What's My Line?", Alice Ball's cure for leprosy, and Roberta Eike stowing away on a research vessel. Some of these poems celebrate women who triumphed spectacularly. Others remember women who barely survived.Explore the stories of women you may have heard of (Marie Curie, Jane Goodall, Émilie du Châtelet) alongside those of others you may not (Virginia Apgar, Maryam Mirzakhani, Ynes Mexia, Susan La Flesche Picotte, Chien-Shiung Wu). If you have come across Randall's poems in Scientific American, Analog, or Asimov's, you will have already opened the door to these tales, all the more extraordinary because they are true.Illustrated with Kristin DiVona's portraits for NASA's "Reaching Across the Stars" project, this is a book to share with scientists, feminists, and poets, young and old and of anygender.…

Paperback. Condizione: New. Four billion women on this planet. And we still have to argue for equality.Yes, there is progress. But inequality and opposition persist - in the law, in the economy, in our bodies, in our daily lives. Equality isn't complicated - it's critical. It's the fundamental human right to go where we want, be who we want, wear what we want, love who we want.The world is failing women and girls. Everywhere. We're in a deeply entrenched system of oppression that could take generations to dismantle. Millions of girls out of school. Women's bodies legislated without their consent. Less pay, more unpaid labor, a fraction of seats at every table that matters. What's it going to take to shatter this status quo?Feminist Firestarter is a call to arms - and to community. A small book with big plans for those who are fed up. For those who light things up. Stand together, fuel the resistance, and turn the oppression of women into ash-one Firestarter at a time. This fight isn't over. It's just getting started.…

Hardback. Condizione: New. A sophisticated critical take on contemporary game culture that reconsiders the boundaries between gamers and games.This book is not about the future of video games. It is not an attempt to predict the moods of the market, the changing profile of gamers, the benevolence or malevolence of the medium. This book is about those predictions. It is about the ways in which the past, present, and future notions of games are narrated and negotiated by a small group of producers, journalists, and gamers, and about how invested these narrators are in telling the story of tomorrow.This new title from Goldsmiths Press by Paolo Ruffino suggests the story could be told another way. Considering game culture, from the gamification of self-improvement to GamerGate's sexism and violence, Ruffino lays out an alternative, creative mode of thinking about the medium: a sophisticated critical take that blurs the distinctions among studying, playing, making, and living with video games. Offering a series of stories that provide alternative narratives of digital gaming, Ruffino aims to encourage all of us who study and play (with) games to raise ethical questions, both about our own role in shaping the objects of research, and about our involvement in the discourses we produce as gamers and scholars. For researchers and students seeking a fresh approach to game studies, and for anyone with an interest in breaking open the current locked-box discourse, Future Gaming offers a radical lens with which to view the future.…

Paperback. Condizione: New. Marriage is a commitmentthat involves our bodies, our minds, our money, our families, and our friends.It is tied in inextricable ways to who we think we are and how we relate toothers. It has also been one of the most controversial subjects in feministdebate. Taking that history into account, A Feminist Guide to Marriage confrontssomething that many feminists still do not want to admit, which is that marriagemust be considered and analyzed for social justice to succeed. Many well-meaning people decide to marry, andthe future of all our intimate relationships-whether we marry or not-depends onappraising this thorny, contradictory institution more accurately.Written by a scholar ofpopular culture who has been teaching for 25 years and married to a man for 15,A Feminist Guide to Marriage shares stories from real people (includingthe author) about everything from dating to divorce. In it, you will learn howto live your desires ethically, what a just marriage looks like, what youshould ask of yourselves, and what you should ask of your partner(s.) Withchapters on sex, money, children, and monogamy, among others, this book willhelp you to use feminist ideals to live, think, act, and love.…

Paperback. Condizione: New. When the dead begin speaking to sixteen-year-old Kim Nguyen, her peaceful childhood is over.A delicate meditation on the nature of ghosts, belief, and how the future is shaped by the past. When the dead begin speaking to sixteen-year-old Kim Nguyen, her peaceful childhood is over. Suddenly everyone wants to exploit her new talent-her family, the Vietnamese government, and even the spirits themselves.…

Paperback. Condizione: New. Scholars around the world on how climate change stands to alter our research methods.Current research norms are increasingly unsustainable for the planet and scholars alike. Dominant modes of research and research dissemination place a premium on frequent travel and ever-expanding and energy-intensive archives of digital data. This shapes the character of research and the research community, advantaging hypermobile, well-resourced scholarly subjects above others, deepening both the climate and labor crises in academia.Low Carbon Research Methods explores the epistemological and equity impacts of high-carbon research as well as the potential gains made possible through a transition towards slower, less mobile, and more collaborative forms of inquiry and exchange. Through short, multi-authored chapters the book examines the prospects and challenges of decarbonizing different academic methods, including archival, ethnographic, arts-based, textual, and digital modes of inquiry. Its authors provide self-reflexive analyses, practical advice, and provocations to researchers new to critical methodology, as well as those returning to their methods with new questions prompted by growing climate justice imperatives, the disruptions of the COVID-19 pandemic, and long-standing critiques from feminist, Global South, and disability studies scholars. In its emphasis on method, the book offers a generative meeting point for these varied concerns and coalitions. Methods usefully tie questions of individual behaviour choices to institutional policies and social practices-specifically around labor-and as such can provide useful avenues of collective action.Finally, the book also builds its project through distinct experiments in form. Its authors explore a range of styles, some specific to their disciplinary traditions, and some drawn from diverse genres including the manifesto, epistolary correspondence, group dialog, memoir, and speculative fiction. These variations in style underscore the argumentative aims of the book as a whole: to open, but not conclusively decide, discussions on this topic within different communities of practice.This title will be available open access.…

Paperback. Condizione: New. A critical and evidence-based account of the COVID-19 pandemic as a political-economic rupture, exposing underlying power struggles and social injustices.The dawn of the COVID-19 pandemic represented an exceptional interruption in the routines of work, financial markets, movement across borders and education. The policies introduced in response were said to be unprecedented-but the distribution of risks and rewards was anything but. While asset-owners, outsourcers, platforms and those in spacious homes prospered, others faced new hardships and dangers.   Unprecedented? explores the events of 2020-21, as they afflicted the UK economy, as a means to grasp the underlying dynamics of contemporary capitalism, which are too often obscured from view. It traces the political and cultural contours of a "rentier nationalism," that was lurking prior to the pandemic, but was accelerated and illuminated by COVID-19. But it also pinpoints the contradictions and weaknesses of this capitalist model, and the new sources of opposition that it meets.   An empirical, accessible and critical analysis of the COVID economy, Unprecedented? is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand the political and economic turbulence of the pandemic's first eighteen months. …

Paperback. Condizione: New. Scholars around the world on how climate change stands to alter our research methods.Current research norms are increasingly unsustainable for the planet and scholars alike. Dominant modes of research and research dissemination place a premium on frequent travel and ever-expanding and energy-intensive archives of digital data. This shapes the character of research and the research community, advantaging hypermobile, well-resourced scholarly subjects above others, deepening both the climate and labor crises in academia.Low Carbon Research Methods explores the epistemological and equity impacts of high-carbon research as well as the potential gains made possible through a transition towards slower, less mobile, and more collaborative forms of inquiry and exchange. Through short, multi-authored chapters the book examines the prospects and challenges of decarbonizing different academic methods, including archival, ethnographic, arts-based, textual, and digital modes of inquiry. Its authors provide self-reflexive analyses, practical advice, and provocations to researchers new to critical methodology, as well as those returning to their methods with new questions prompted by growing climate justice imperatives, the disruptions of the COVID-19 pandemic, and long-standing critiques from feminist, Global South, and disability studies scholars. In its emphasis on method, the book offers a generative meeting point for these varied concerns and coalitions. Methods usefully tie questions of individual behaviour choices to institutional policies and social practices-specifically around labor-and as such can provide useful avenues of collective action.Finally, the book also builds its project through distinct experiments in form. Its authors explore a range of styles, some specific to their disciplinary traditions, and some drawn from diverse genres including the manifesto, epistolary correspondence, group dialog, memoir, and speculative fiction. These variations in style underscore the argumentative aims of the book as a whole: to open, but not conclusively decide, discussions on this topic within different communities of practice.This title will be available open access.…

Paperback. Condizione: New. In a re-wilded, near-future England, a group of activists led by a writer try to make a noise in a society that refuses to hear its people.A re-wilded, half-submerged England is home to a divided society split into "haves" and "have-nots." Susan, once a teacher and writer, leads a small group of activists as they try to spread words-any words-in a world that no longer produces books. The Ghostwriters must try to revive ideas and get their message out whilst pitted against a system that shuts down thought and learning.After the break-up of the United Kingdom, war in Europe, starvation, and pandemic, the Capital is a society under siege. People just manage to survive on rations and scraps that they thieve. Always monitored, but never protected, life is cheap among the population. The Ghostwriters must navigate dangers, but who can be trusted and what secrets lie beneath the surface of the Old Capital.…

Paperback. Condizione: New. A transdisciplinary study of the ways in which mobilities assume social forms and result in multiple belongings.In Decolonial Imaginings, Avtar Brah offers a transdisciplinary study of the ways in which mobilities assume social forms and result in multiple belongings. Situated within the confluence of decolonial feminist theory, border theory, and diaspora studies, the book explores borders and boundaries and how politics of connectivity are produced in and through struggles over "difference." Brah examines multiple formations of power embedded in the intersections between gender, race, class, ethnicity, and sexuality. She analyzes this intersectionality in relation to diaspora; theorizes the relationship between diaspora, law, and literature; and between affect, memory, and cultural politics. Discussing the crossings of impervious borders, Brah foregrounds the economies of abandonment, particularly the plight of people in boats in the Mediterranean, a number of whom perished because of a catalogue of failures by NATO warships and European coast guards. She revisits Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's notion of "nomad thought" and Braidotti's feminist reworking of it, and it seeks to assess this framework's value today. She analyzes the politics of "Black" in Britain with a focus on feminism constituted by women of African Caribbean and South Asian background, explores stereotypic representation of Muslim women in the context of Islamophobia and anti-Muslim racism, and considers the complexities of the #MeToo movement and how whiteness is configured in these contestations. …

Hardback. Condizione: New. On how Generative AI and cults such as QAnon spread digitally and culturally follow the same rules as biological viruses.This groundbreaking new book reveals the hidden connections between artificial intelligence, conspiracy theories, and global pandemics. Virus is a Language presents a revolutionary framework showing how biological viruses, digital technologies, and cultural movements all operate according to the same fundamental viral principles.Drawing on decades of expertise in human-machine systems, Chris Hables Gray demonstrates that viruses-whether biological like COVID-19, digital like generative AI, or cultural like QAnon-share basic properties that can be analyzed as a unified language. This "viral language" has its own grammar and vocabulary governing how these forces propagate, mutate, and impact society.Just as we learned to speak the language of computers to harness their power, we must now learn to "speak virus" to navigate our complex world. Through case studies of generative AI, COVID-19, and QAnon, the work develops a comprehensive theory of "Virus as a Language."This framework provides crucial insights into exponential growth, infection patterns, immunization strategies, mutation processes, and extinction. Understanding these viral dynamics gives readers tools for analyzing Facebook's algorithmic influence, misinformation spread, AI evolution, and cultural contagion.The timing is critical. As generative AI revolutionizes culture, experts warn of future pandemics, and viral cults spread through social media, understanding these interconnected phenomena becomes essential for shaping our future rather than merely observing it.Written accessibly, Virus as a Language offers readers conceptual tools to decode viral processes reshaping society. Unlike books examining pandemics, AI, or conspiracy theories in isolation, this work reveals their deep structural connections through a unified framework, promising to foster essential conversations about the viral forcesdefining our world.…

Paperback. Condizione: New. Science fiction as a vital bridge between technoscience and culture, an early warning system, a method for imagining differently.In the new millennium, science fiction has moved from the margins to the mainstream. At the same time, it has undergone massive transformations. No longer can it be derided as indigestible technobabble or escapist trash or a white man's playground-not that it ever really was. Sf is rich and diverse, serious, and fun. A vital bridge between technoscience and culture, it is an early warning system, a method for imagining differently, and a way of experiencing our increasingly science-fictional world. It is the vernacular of the 21st century. This Is Not A Science Fiction Textbook brings together leading sf scholars, including some of the most exciting new critical voices, to introduce the genre for the general reader. Its first part outlines some key ideas used to think about sf, such as Estrangement, Extrapolation, and Alterity. Its second part maps some of the genre's global history, from the Enlightenment and European colonialism to Indigenous and African Futurisms. Its third part surveys sf at the turn of the 2020s, organised by concepts, movements and new academic disciplines, from Afrofuturism and Animal Studies to Queer Theory and the Weird-and each chapter, whether it is on Climate Fiction or Neurodiversity, is accompanied by an introduction to a major contemporary novel and film.…

Paperback. Condizione: New. A poverty-stricken veteran of online social justice battles joins with a group of unlikely allies to fight in the war of disinformation before Britain becomes fully totalitarian.The lives of three strangers intersect to bring hope to a beleaguered near-future Britain lurching towards authoritarianism.Libby Seymour is a Civil Servant, military intelligence analyst, Union activist, believer in the equality of justice, and member of the MayGE Committee campaigning for a long-overdue General Election. A colleague tells her the police want a word about something she didn't do. and she goes on the run with the help of her occasional lover, ex-army doctor, now trauma therapist, Susan Church. Derek Hallett is a British Army officer with an impressive record in special operations. Newly promoted to Major General, he is stunned to be assigned to a secretive job in England. For commercial reasons, Jackson-Burgess (UK) Ltd steps back from administering four work camps designed to reduce poverty in Britain. He swore to the Crown to uphold the rule of law.Kayla Nettleton has two lives. Online, she's a veteran Cultural Warrior and defender of social justice through hacking. In real life, she's trapped with her family in a sink estate, and is swept up into the poverty eradication programme run by Jackson-Burgess. Together, the three unlikely allies spearhead a small resistance group to fight back in the Disinformation War.…

Hardback. Condizione: New. How artificial intelligence and robotics are transforming the future of love and desire: a philosophical thriller and essays.A chance encounter between two women and a road trip into the future: It's Christmas Eve, and Scarlett, banker-turned-technologist, is leaving a secret underground lab to catch the last flight that will get her home in time to open presents with her three-year-old son. She offers a lift to a young woman in distress, who shares her intimate life story as they drive to the airport. These revelations will have devastating consequences for both of them. The Love Makers is a philosophical thriller about female friendship, class, motherhood, women, and work--and how artificial intelligence and robotics are transforming the future of love and desire. Aifric Campbell combines her novel with essays from leading scientists and commentators who examine what's at stake in our human-machine relationships. What is our future as friends, parents, lovers? Will advances in intelligent machines reverse decades of progress for women? From robot nannies to generative art and our ancient dreams of intelligent machines, The Love Makers blends storytelling with science communication to investigate the challenges and opportunities of emergent technologies and how we want to live. ContributorsRonny Bogani, Joanna J. Bryson, Julie Carpenter, Stephen Cave, Anita Chandran, Peter R. N. Childs, Kate Devlin, Kanta Dihal, Mary Flanagan, Margaret Rhee, Amanda Sharkey, Roberto Trotta, E. R. Truitt, and Richard Watson.…

Paperback. Condizione: New. The practices of magic and contemporary myth-making in relation to landscape, performance, and writing.From Magic and Myth-Work to Care and Repair is a two-part book bringing together fourteen essays broadly concerned with the "fiction of the self" and with practices and explorations beyond that fiction. Each part of the book approaches this theme from a different angle.The first part, entitled "On Magic and Myth-Work," deals with practices of transformation and with contemporary myth-making in relation to landscape, performance, and writing. The second part, "On Care and Repair," gathers together essays that are more personal, but that also look to various technologies (or devices) of self-care alongside ideas of collaboration and the collective. Crucial throughout this exploration are questions of agency and self-narration, but also how these connect to larger issues around historical trauma, neoliberalism, and ecological crisis.The essays reference many other texts and fellow travellers, and also draw on the author's own experiences (and teaching) within various art and theory worlds, as well as with performance, magical practices, gaming, and Buddhism.…

Paperback. Condizione: New. An exploration of the rich and varied relationship between photography and the most recent Argentine dictatorship.Familiar Faces offers a diverse, theoretically rich, and empirically informed exploration of photography in Argentina's memorial, political, and artistic landscape. During the country's most recent civic-military dictatorship (1976-1983), 30,000 people were disappeared or killed by the state. Over the decades, vernacular and professional photographs have been central to the Argentine struggle for justice. They were used not only to protest the disappearances under the dictatorship and to denounce the authorities, but also as tools of political and social activism, and for remembering the disappeared.With contributions from leading Argentina-based anthropologists, ethnographers, curators, art scholars, media researchers, and photographers, Familiar Faces moves beyond the traditional considerations of representation, focusing instead on the ways in which photography is continuously reimagined as a tool of memory, mourning, and political and judicial activism. In so doing, it considers the diverse uses of press photography; artistic practice; photographs of the disappeared in domestic rituals; photographs of the inmates of torture centers; the reclamation of images taken by the dictatorial state for memorial and activist purposes. Written and published at a crucial moment in Argentine memory politics, Familiar Faces offers a geographically and formally diverse selection of case studies, with international as well as regional resonance. While firmly rooted in this national context, the book contributes to wider, global debates about the increasingly pervasive role of the photographic image in relation to state-sponsored, large-scale violence.…

Hardback. Condizione: New. A novel conceptualization of the politics of walls and other surfaces by bringing together critical cultural and media theory and post-communist studies of urban space.What does it mean to examine post-communist politics through the prism of the material and semiotic transformations and modifications of surfaces? A rethinking of surfaces as dynamic and complex sites opens a path for a detailed study of their crucial role in the governing of post-communist urban space-but also of the forms of subversion that can be discerned through interventions on and with surfaces. The book explores a set of surfaces-Wall, Monument, Electricity Boxes, Memes, and Paving Brick-to investigate the kind of political engagement they enable and foreclose in post-communist Sofia, Bulgaria. The examination of each of these sites draws on an array of interconnected theoretical propositions, pertaining to surfaces' conceptualization as temporal, fictitious and relational objects engaged in the production of political meaning.Politics of Surfaces brings critical cultural and media theory, philosophy, and postcommunist studies into conversation with each other, allowing for a two-fold political and theoretical intervention. On the one hand, it intervenes in existing scholarship on surfaces by demonstrating the stakes of their politicised understanding as complex spatio-temporal objects. On the other hand, it permits the crossing of disciplinary boundaries in the field of post-communist studies (usually reserved for area studies approaches). This involves a rethinking of some of the common presumptions about the post-communist condition such as its apolitical character, the governmental logic of temporal belatedness and the dominance of a memory studies approach for the analysis of post-communist transformations of public heritage sites such asmonuments.…

Hardback. Condizione: New. An investigation of the cultures and technologies of early radio and how a generation of cultural operators-with Schoen at the center-addressed crisis and adversity.Dials, knobs, microphones, clocks; heads, hands, breath, voices. Ernst Schoen joined Frankfurt Radio in the 1920s as programmer and accelerated the potentials of this collision of bodies and technologies. As with others of his generation, Schoen experienced crisis after crisis, from the violence of war, the suicide of friends, economic collapse, and a brief episode of permitted experimentalism under the Weimar Republic for those who would foster aesthetic, technical, and political revolution. The counterreaction was Nazism-and Schoen and his milieux fell victim to it, found ways out of it, or hit against it with all their might.Dissonant Waves tracks the life of Ernst Schoen-poet, composer, radio programmer, theorist, and best friend of Walter Benjamin from childhood-as he moves between Frankfurt, Berlin, Paris, and London. It casts radio history and practice into concrete spaces, into networks of friends and institutions, into political exigencies and domestic plights, and into broader aesthetic discussions of the politicization of art and the aestheticization of politics. Through friendship and comradeship, a position in state-backed radio, imprisonment, exile, networking in a new country, re-emigration, ill-treatment, neglect, Schoen suffers the century and articulates its broken promises.An exploration of the ripples of radio waves, the circuits of experimentation and friendship, and the proposals that half-found a route into the world-and might yet spark political-technical experimentation.…