Suchergebnisse

"In this ethnographic study, Johannes Lenhard observes the daily practices, routines and techniques of people who are sleeping rough on the streets of Paris. The book focusses on their survival practises, their short-term desires and hopes, how they earn money through begging, how they choose the best place to sleep at night and what role drugs and alcohol play in their lives. The book also follows people through different institutional settings, including a homeless day centre, a needle exchange, a centre for people with alcohol problems and a homeless shelter."

Wie verändern Computer und Simulationsmodelle die Praxis in den Wissenschaften? Lenhard charakterisiert Computersimulationen in methodologischer und epistemischer Hinsicht. Die in der Geschichte der modernen Wissenschaften so wirkmächtige Konzeption der mathematischen Modellierung erfährt eine Neubestimmung: Theorie und Technologie werden miteinander verzahnt, wobei sich die Natur- und die Ingenieurswissenschaften einander annähern.

Im vorliegenden Buch geht es um die methodologische und epistemologische Charakterisierung der Computersimulation. Zu diesem Zweck werden Computermodelle vor der Kontrastfolie mathematischer Modelle betrachtet. Eine Strategie der Mathematisierung zielt darauf ab, komplexe Phänomene in idealisierter Form zu modellieren und so die Komplexität zu reduzieren. Die Simulation markiert das Ende dieser Strategie: Die Modelle werden nun selbst komplex und erhalten eine partielle Autonomie. Insbesondere der Prozess der Simulationsmodellierung erfährt gegenüber traditioneller mathematischer Modellierung eine Transformation. Als zentrale Merkmale der Simulationsmodellierung werden anhand typischer Beispiele analysiert: Artifizialität, Experimentieren, Visualisierung, Plastizität und epistemische Opazität. Erst aus der Verknüpfung dieser Merkmale resultiert ein philosophisch neuartiges Bild, das wiederum zum Diskurs um das Verhältnis von Wissenschaft und Technik beiträgt.

AbstractThe English language has adopted the word Tardis for something that looks simple from the outside but is much more complicated when inspected from the inside. The word comes from a BBC science fiction series, in which the Tardis is a machine for traveling in time and space, that looks like a phone booth from the outside. This paper claims that simulation models are a Tardis in a way that calls into question their transferability. The argument is developed taking Molecular Modeling and Simulation as an example. There, simulation models are force fields that describe the molecular interactions and that look like simple and highly modular mathematical expressions. To make them work, they contain parameters that are adjusted to match certain data. The role of these parameters and the way they are obtained is seriously under-appreciated. It is constitutive for the model and central for its applicability and performance. Hence, the model is more than it seems so that working with adjustable parameters deeply affects the ontology of simulation models. This is particularly crucial for the transferability of the models: the information on how a model was trained is like luggage the model must carry on its voyage.

In this Review essay, we examine some of the latest and needed scholarship on harm reduction: Travis Lupick's Fighting for Space: How a Group of Drug Users Transformed One City's Struggle with Addiction (2018); Jarrett Zigon's A War on People: Drug User Politics and a New Ethics of Community (2019); Kimberly Sue'sGetting Wrecked: Women, Incarceration, and the American Opioid Crisis(2019); and Nancy Campbell'sOD: Naloxone and the Politics of Overdose(2020). Our authors present us with intimate windows into a diverse array of geographies, peoples, and technologies—from women's jails, prisons, and community treatment programmes in Massachusetts to Vancouver's downtown; from Copenhagen's safe injection sites to prisons in Scotland. While varied in methods and approaches, these works unequivocally push for alternative imaginings to what one of Campbell's protagonists dubs the 'North American disaster'. Harm reduction is front and centre to these authors' envisioning of a kinder, more loving, and more accepting future. Embracing harm reduction both requires and initiates a radical rethinking of how drug use is viewed, and our authors have given us crucial insight and analyses into how such reorientations are possible. We encourage continued scholarship on this topic, especially on non-Western options.

Primarily on the basis of ethnographic case-studies from around the world, this volume links investigations of work to questions of personal and professional identity and social relations. In the era of digitalized neoliberalism, particular attention is paid to notions of freedom, both collective (in social relations) and individual (in subjective experiences). These cannot be investigated separately. Rather than juxtapose economy with ethics (or the profitable with the good), the authors uncover complex entanglements between the drudgery experienced by most people in the course of making a living and ideals of emancipated personhood