front cover of Obstacles to Environmental Progress
Obstacles to Environmental Progress
A US Perspective
Peter C. Schulze
University College London, 2022
A comprehensive guide to the impediments facing environmentally progressive agendas.

Despite the comprehensively understood severity of environmental problems faced today, progress in the United States is continually stymied, making sustainability feel like a far-off goal. Obstacles to Environmental Progress takes up the structural, political, and cultural forces that routinely hinder progress on existing environmental issues. Addressing problems both small and large, often regardless of whether an issue is controversial, this book illustrates obstacles that manifest in the United States but are globally pertinent. Peter Schulze identifies eighteen practical obstacles that fall into three categories: scientific challenges to anticipating and detecting problems; political and economic factors that interfere with responding; and obstacles to effective responses. This book seeks to hasten environmental progress by bridging academic disciplines to forewarn and forearm those who might otherwise encounter these anti-environmentalist obstacles in an ad-hoc manner.
 
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Olga Tufnell's “Perfect Journey”
Letters and Photographs of an Archaeologist in the Levant and Mediterranean
Edited by John D.M. Green and Henry Ros
University College London, 2021
A fascinating personal account of archaeology and travel in the interwar era in Palestine.

Olga Tufnell was a British archaeologist working in Egypt, Cyprus, and Palestine in the 1920s and 1930s—a period often described as a golden age of archaeological discovery. For the first time, this book presents Tufnell’s account of her experiences in her own words. Based largely on letters, the text is accompanied by dozens of photographs that shed light on her personal experiences of travel and dig life at this extraordinary time. Introductory material by John D.M. Green and Ros Henry provides the social, historical, biographical, and archaeological context, as the letters offer new insights into the social and professional networks and history of archaeological research in Palestine under the British Mandate. They provide insights into the role of foreign archaeologists, relationships with local workers and inhabitants, and the colonial framework within which they operated during turbulent times. This book will be an important resource for those studying the history of archaeology in the Eastern Mediterranean, particularly for the sites of Qau el-Kebir, Tell Fara, Tell el-‘Ajjul and Tell ed-Duweir (ancient Lachish). Moreover, Tufnell’s lively style makes this a fascinating personal account of archaeology and travel in the interwar era.
 
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On Boredom
Essays in Art and Writing
Edited by Rye Dag Holmboe and Susan Morris
University College London, 2021
An idiosyncratic volume featuring artwork and essays on the history of boredom.

What do we mean when we say that we are bored? Contributors to this volume, which include artists, art historians, psychoanalysts, and a novelist, examine boredom in its manifold and uncertain reality. Each part of the book takes up a crucial moment in the history of boredom and presents it in a new light, taking the reader from the trials of the consulting room to the experience of hysteria in the nineteenth century. The book pays particular attention to boredom’s relationship with the sudden and rapid advances in technology that have occurred in recent decades, specifically technologies of communication, surveillance, and automation. On Boredom is idiosyncratic for its combination of image and text, and the artworks included in its pages—featuring Mathew Hale, Martin Creed, and Susan Morris—help turn this volume into a material expression of boredom itself. It will appeal to readers in the fields of art history, literature, cultural studies, and visual culture.
 
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On Learning
A General Theory of Objects and Object-Relations
David Scott
University College London, 2021
A philosophical work that tackles the question, “What is learning?”.

What is learning? This book is a philosophical work that develops a general theory of ontological objects and object-relations, examining concepts as acquired dispositions. David Scott answers a series of questions about concepts in general and the concept of learning in particular. This volume offers a counterargument to empiricist conceptions of learning, rejecting the propagation of simple messages about learning, knowledge, curriculum, and assessment. Instead, Scott argues that values are central to understanding how we live, permeating our descriptions of the world, the attempts we make at creating better futures, and our relations with other people.
 
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On Learning, Volume 2
Philosophies, Concepts and Practices
Edited by David Scott
University College London, 2024
An original and provocative interpretation of learning as a concept and as a practice.

The contributors to this volume focus on two meta-concepts: knowledge and learning, on the relationship between the two, and the way these can be framed in epistemic, social, political, and economic terms. Knowledge and learning, as meta-concepts, are positioned in various networks or constellations of meaning, principally: their antecedents, their relations to other relevant concepts, and the way the concepts are used in the lifeworld.

The various authors in this book explore several important concepts that are relevant to the idea of learning: Meta-concepts such as epistemology, inferential role semantics, phenomenology, rationality, thinking, hermeneutics, critical realism, and pragmatism. Meso-concepts such as probability, woman, training, assessment, education, system, race, friendship, Bildung, curriculum, ecology and pedagogy. Like David Scott’s first volume of On Learning, this collection also focuses on philosophy, concepts, and practices as a response to empiricist and positivist conceptions of knowledge. It challenges reductionist ideas of learning that have filtered through to the management of our schools, colleges, and universities; confronts over-simplified messages about learning, knowledge, curriculum, and assessment; and fosters the denial that values are central to understanding how we live and how we should live, the normative dimension to social policy and social theory.
 
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front cover of On Making in the Digital Humanities
On Making in the Digital Humanities
The Scholarship of Digital Humanities Development in Honour of John Bradley
Edited by Julianne Nyhan, Geoffrey Rockwell, Stéfan Sinclair, and Alexandra Ortolja-Baird
University College London, 2023
A collection that explores the processes of making within the digital humanities.

On Making in the Digital Humanities fills a gap in our understanding of digital humanities projects and craft by exploring the processes of making as much as the products that arise from it. Focusing on the interwoven layers of human and technological textures that constitute digital humanities scholarship, it assembles a group of well-known, experienced, and emerging scholars in the digital humanities to reflect on various forms of making. The chapters gathered here are individually important, but together provide a very human view of what it is to do the digital humanities, in the past, present, and future. This book will accordingly be of interest to researchers, teachers, and students of the digital humanities; creative humanities, including maker spaces and culture; information studies; the history of computing and technology; and the history of science and the humanities.
 
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front cover of Online and Distance Education for a Connected World
Online and Distance Education for a Connected World
Edited by Linda Amrane-Cooper, David Baume, Stephen Brown, Stylianos Hatzipanagos, Philip Powell, Sarah Sherman, and Alan Tait
University College London, 2023
A collection addressing the theory and practice of online and distance education.

The COVID-19 pandemic led to the widespread adoption of distance and online learning in higher education, which has presented opportunities for large-scale, inclusive, flexible, and engaging learning. This volume, assembled by the University of London’s Centre for Online and Distance Education, addresses the practice and theory of online and distance education, building on knowledge and expertise developed in the university across nearly a century and a half. Contributors explore important principles and highlight successful practices in areas such as course design and pedagogy, online assessment, open education, inclusive practice, and enabling students' voices. Case studies illustrate prominent issues and approaches. Together, the chapters offer current and future leaders and practitioners a practical, productive, practice- and theory-informed account of the present and likely future state of online and distance higher education worldwide.
 
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The Origins of Self
An Anthropological Perspective
Martin P. J. Edwardes
University College London, 2019
The Origins of Self explores the role selfhood plays in defining both human society and each individual in that society. It considers the genetic and cultural origins of self, the role that self plays in socialization and language, and the types of selves we generate in our individual journeys to and through adulthood. Martin P. J. Edwardes argues that other-awareness is a relatively early evolutionary development, present throughout the primate clade and perhaps beyond, but self-awareness is a product of the sharing of social models, something only humans appear to do. The self of which we are aware is not something innate within us, it is a model of our self produced as a response to the models of us offered to us by other people. Edwardes proposes that human construction of selfhood involves seven different types of self. All but one of them are internally generated models, and the only nonmodel, the actual self, is completely hidden from conscious awareness. We rely on others to tell us about our self, and even to let us know we are a self. Developed in relation to a range of subject areas—linguistics, anthropology, genomics, and cognition, as well as sociocultural theory—The Origins of Self is of particular interest to students and researchers studying the origins of language, human origins in general, and the cognitive differences between human and other animal psychologies.
 
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front cover of Outrage
Outrage
The Rise of Religious Offence in Contemporary South Asia
Edited by Paul Rollier, Kathinka Frøystad, and Arild Engelsen Ruud
University College London, 2019
Whether spurred by religious images or history books, hardly a day goes by in South Asia without an accusation of blasphemy. What accounts for the sharp rise in religious offense, and why it is observable across religious and political differences?   

An interdisciplinary study of this trend, Outrage brings together researchers in anthropology, religious studies, and South Asian studies with rich experience in the varied ways religion and politics intersect in this region. Each chapter focuses on a recent case of alleged blasphemy or desecration in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Myanmar, unpacking the religious sensitivities and political concerns. Collectively, the chapters explore common denominators across national and religious differences, such as the introduction of social media and smartphones, the possible political gains of initiating blasphemy accusations, and the growing self-assertion of marginal communities.
 
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