Suchergebnisse

Energy is increasingly used as a lens to study wider social processes. For political ecologists, 'energy' has usually been seen as a resource or socio-technical system that gives rise to contentious social relations. This article instead thinks of energy as a materiality with thermodynamic properties. At once, energy becomes an analytical concept with physical and political-economic dimensions. Developing this perspective, the article examines the notion of ecologically unequal exchange and unpacks discussions on how energy systems are co-productive of politicised environments. The outcome is an expanded definition of political ecology set out in relation to three modes of social power.

This Element aims to explore how the relation between societal organisation and legal orders - the question of materiality - has been investigated in philosophy of law. The starting point of the Element is that such relation has often been left invisible or thematised in poor and reductive terms. After having explained the main reasons behind this neglect, the Element provides an overview of the three main approaches to legal philosophy whose contributions, though not always effective, can still provide some insights for a contemporary analysis of legal orders' materiality: materialism, legal institutionalism, and the new materialism. The last section of the Element suggests looking for a footing for the study of materiality in two fields: the metaphysics of relations and the political economy of legal orders.

Taking seriously debates in IR about the significance of materiality and noticing the prominence of materiality in contemporary counterpiracy interventions, this article combines insights from Science and Technology Studies (STS) with insights from the poststructuralist intervention literature. Both literatures highlight the importance of "constitutive effects." Poststructuralists do so with attention to the effects of intervention in constituting, temporarily, the meaning of sovereignty, and STS scholars do so with attention to constitutive effects that processes at the level of materiality give rise to. By combining these two literatures, this article asks: how might we think about the constitutive effects of material aspects of counterpiracy interventions? This question is explored through a focus on two donor-funded pirate prisons in Somalia. By operationalizing the STS notions of coproduction (Jasanoff 2004c) and solution/problem-framings (Beck et al. 2016), the article broadens the study of how intervention practices give rise to constitutive effects by explicitly attending to processes at the level of materiality. This approach enables the article to highlight an important tension in contemporary intervention practices: a tension between donor's desire to delimit intervention contributions and the risk that such contributions (including presumably more easily delineated material aspects) give rise to effects that challenge this faith in neatly delimited forms of intervention. This tension is not only relevant in relation to Somali counterpiracy, but also in other intervention contexts. The article thus illustrates how STS insights can help advance our appreciation of the manifold dimensions and effects of contemporary interventionism.

AbstractTaking seriously debates in IR about the significance of materiality and noticing the prominence of materiality in contemporary counterpiracy interventions, this article combines insights from Science and Technology Studies (STS) with insights from the poststructuralist intervention literature. Both literatures highlight the importance of "constitutive effects." Poststructuralists do so with attention to the effects of intervention in constituting, temporarily, the meaning of sovereignty, and STS scholars do so with attention to constitutive effects that processes at the level of materiality give rise to. By combining these two literatures, this article asks: how might we think about the constitutive effects of material aspects of counterpiracy interventions? This question is explored through a focus on two donor-funded pirate prisons in Somalia. By operationalizing the STS notions of coproduction (Jasanoff 2004c) and solution/problem-framings (Beck et al. 2016), the article broadens the study of how intervention practices give rise to constitutive effects by explicitly attending to processes at the level of materiality. This approach enables the article to highlight an important tension in contemporary intervention practices: a tension between donor's desire to delimit intervention contributions and the risk that such contributions (including presumably more easily delineated material aspects) give rise to effects that challenge this faith in neatly delimited forms of intervention. This tension is not only relevant in relation to Somali counterpiracy, but also in other intervention contexts. The article thus illustrates how STS insights can help advance our appreciation of the manifold dimensions and effects of contemporary interventionism.

The study of cultural objects and their materiality has moved to the center of cultural sociology. This review synthesizes the work of this third wave of cultural sociology, demonstrating how insights from the study of cultural objects and their mechanisms of meaning-making deepen our theories of culture in action, culture and cognition, and the production and reception of culture. After placing this third wave in the historical context of cultural sociology, this review clarifies three concepts: cultural objects, material culture, and materiality. This review then makes a series of interventions around meaning-making and action based on insights from scholarship on cultural objects and materiality. First, it advocates attention to qualities in addition to symbols. Then it examines how object affordances constrain and enable meaning and use and how objects have material agency. Then the role of cultural objects in stabilizing and destabilizing meaning and social arrangements is discussed. Finally, cultural power—whether and how cultural objects shape belief and behavior—is considered through the orienting concepts of figure and ground.

Recent scholarship has drawn attention to a ubiquitous 20th-century political space that was long overlooked – the bunker. This body of work draws on a variety of theoretical influences and explores multiple historical contexts, yet most remains wedded to the late Paul Virilio's influential 1970s study of the Nazi Atlantic Wall. Enlightening as his 'Bunker Archeology' is, Virilio's theorization has constrained contemporary debates around the function, materiality and temporality of the bunker. Here, we seek to counter this set of limitations in three ways. First, we contest the idea of the bunker as a simple space of human protection and argue for a more expansive conceptualization that is attentive to the bunker as a site of extermination. Second, we challenge the assumed concrete materiality of the bunker and suggest an expanded typology, utilizing a range of materials and milieux. Finally, we take to task readings of the bunker as an obsolete relic by highlighting the continued construction, re-appropriation and reimagination of this architectural form.

List of Figures -- List of Contributors -- Foreword, David Morgan (Duke University, USA) -- Acknowledgements -- Introduction, Minna Opas & Anna Haapalainen (University of Turku, Finland) -- Part 1: Doubting -- 1. Spirit Media and the Spectre of the Fake, Marleen de Witte (Unviersity of Amsterdam, the Netherlands) -- 2. Organic Faith in Amazonia: De-indexification, doubt and Christian corporeality, Minna Opas (University of Turku, Finland) -- 3. Things not for themselves: idolatry and consecration in Orthodox Ethiopia, Tom Boylston (University of Edinburgh) -- Part 2: Sufficing -- 4. The Bible in the Digital Age: Negotiating the Limits of 'Bibleness' of Different Bible Media, Katja Rakow(Heidelberg University, Germany) -- 5. The Plausibility of Immersion: limits and creativity in materializing the Bible, James Bielo (Miami University, USA) -- 6. Humanizing the Bible: Limits of materiality in a passion play, Anna Haapalainen (University of Turku, Finland) -- 7. The death and rebirth of a crucifix: Materiality and the sacred in Andean vernacular Catholicism, Diego Alonso Huerta (Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú / University of Helsinki, Finland) -- Part 3: Unbinding -- 8. Proving the Inner Word: (De)materializing the Spirit in Radical Pietism Elisa Heinämäki (University of Helsinki, Finland) -- 9. The Return of the Unclean Spirit: Collapse and Relapse in the Baptist rehab ministry Igor Mikeshin (University of Helsinki, Finland) -- 10. Mimesis and Mediation in the Semana Santa Processions of Granada, Sari Kuuva, University of Jyväskylä -- Afterword: Diana Espirito Santo (Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, Chile) -- Bibliography -- Index.

Introduction : matter and meaning : a cultural sociology of nationalism / Geneviève Zubrzycki -- Artisans and the construction of the French state : the political role of the Louvre's workshops / Chandra Mukerji -- In, on, and of the inviolable soil : pottery fragments and the materiality of Italian nationhood / Fiona Rose-Greenland -- Raw materials : natural resources, technological discourse, and the making of Canadian nationalism / Melissa Aronczyk -- Simultaneously worlds apart : placing national diversity on display at Boston's Museum of Fine Arts / Peggy Levitt -- A brief history of sweat : inscribing "national feeling" on and through a football jersey / Claudio E. Benzecry -- That banal object of nationalism : "old stones" as French heritage in the early days of public television / Alexandra Kowalski -- The mythical power of everyday objects : the material culture of radical nationalism in postsocialist Hungary / Virág Molnár -- Engaging objects : a phenomenology of the tea ceremony and Japaneseness / Kristin Surak -- Traces and steps : expanding Polishness through a Jewish sensorium? / Geneviève Zubrzycki -- A temple of social hope? : Tempelhof Airport in Berlin and its transformation / Dominik Bartmański

"{Im}materiality: Designing for More Sense/s" is an edited compilation of articles that explore the complexity of embodied human experience within the built environment. A particular aim of these collected works is to look toward how deepening one's understandings of the experiences of bodies in space and place can contribute to future built environments. The contributors to this special issue are trained in practice-based disciplines such as architecture, product development, and ergonomics. At the same time, they bring in particular theoretical backgrounds of research experience in anthropology, design history and theory, and sociology. They come together through a focus on heterogeneous experiences of disability to articulate themes and issues that illustrate immaterial connections to the material world.

1. Visuality/materiality : introducing a manifesto for practice / Gillian Rose and Divya P. Tolia-Kelly -- 2. Metallic modernities in the space age : visualizing the Caribbean, materializing the modern / Mimi Sheller -- 3. Visuality, "China commodity city", and the force of things / Mark Jackson -- 4. Tristes Entropique : steel, ships and time images for late modernity / Mike Crang -- 5. Citizen and denizen space : if walls could speak / Nirmal Puwar -- 6. Seeing air / Caren Yglesias -- 7. Intra-actions in Loweswater, Cumbria : new collectives, blue-green algae, and the visualisation of invisible presences through sound and science / Judith Tsouvalis, Claire Waterton and Ian J. Winfield -- 8. Materialising vision : performing a high-rise view / Jane M. Jacobs, Stephen Cairns and Ignaz Strebel -- 9. Melancholic memorialisation : the ethical demands of grievable lives / Karen Wells -- 10. Indifferent looks : visual inattention and the composition of strangers / Paul Frosh.

Camps as a global and ubiquitous mass phenomenon of the present and a flexible isolation tool for/against specific socially, politically, or ethnically defined groups are at the centre of current policies and societal debates. In the present volume, the authors explore camps as (cultural) spaces in a broad sense and deal with their complex dimensions as sites of the Modern. They examine camp spaces and their social configurations, physical/architectural qualities, symbolic functions as well as cultural representations in an intent to define the inscribed ambivalences, inconsistencies and paradoxes of the phenomenon. Positioned within different disciplinary contexts (Contemporary History, Visual Studies, Architectural History, Refugee and Gender Studies), the assembled articles present a wide range of understandings and approaches to space, materiality and the relations between governance and agency. The contributors stress the entanglement of social structures, cultural discourse, institutionalisation, individual perception and appropriation. They show how the issue of camps can serve as cross-sectional matter for researchers in different fields in Cultural Theory and Contemporary History.

The Open Access version of this book, available at https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/e/9781351233392, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license. This volume examines the ways in which people engage with therapeutic practices, such as life coaching, mindfulness, complementary and alternative medicine, sex and relationship counselling, spiritual healing and self-tracking. It investigates how human and non-human actors, systems of thought and practice are assembled and interwoven in therapeutic engagements, and traces the situated, material and political dimensions of these engagements. By focusing on lived experiences through ethnographically informed case studies, the book elucidates the diverse forms, meanings and embodied effects of therapeutic engagements in different settings, as well as their potential for both oppressive and subversive social change. In this way, Assembling Therapeutics contributes to our understanding of multiple modes of healing, self-knowledge and power in contemporary societies.