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Activist Film Festivals
Towards a Political Subject
Edited by Sonia Tascón and Tyson Wils
Intellect Books, 2016
Film festivals are an ever-growing part of the film industry, but most considerations of them focus almost entirely on their role in the business of filmmaking.
This book breaks new ground by bringing scholars from a range of disciplines together with industry professionals to explore the concept of festivals as spaces through an activist lens, as spaces where the sociopolitical identities of communities and individuals are confronted and shaped. Tracing the growth of activist and human rights-focused films from the 1970s to the present, and using case studies from San Francisco, Brazil, Bristol, and elsewhere, the book addresses such contentious topics as whether activist films can achieve humanitarian aims or simply offer “cinema of suffering.” Ultimately, the contributors attack the question of just how effective festivals are at producing politically engaged spectators?
 
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The Arab Christ
Towards an Arab Christian Theology of Conviviality
Mouchir Basile Aoun
Gingko, 2022
A reflection on Christianity in Arab society.
 
This work explores the Christian faith in the current intercultural context of Arab societies. It argues that Arab Christianity seeks to express the Christian faith through openness to Muslim otherness, existential conviviality, and fraternal solidarity. In order to safeguard not only the physical existence of these communities but also and above all the relevance and richness of their message of life, the theological reflection presented here takes on a three-part task. First, it faithfully describes the sociopolitical and sociocultural reality of the historical integration of Arab Christian communities. Second, it reinterprets the content of the Christ event with reference to the challenge of Muslim otherness. And finally, it offers a path for conversion that involves a form not only of evangelical practice, designed to foster bonds of fraternal solidarity between the inhabitants of the Arab world but also of shared spiritual quest for moral and political commitment.
 
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China's Global Strategy
Towards a Multipolar World
Jenny Clegg
Pluto Press, 2009

China is fast emerging as a powerful player on the world stage. This book takes a closer look at the country's stance on a range of global issues, arguing that its multipolar diplomacy offers a concrete strategy to constrain the US pursuit of unipolar primacy.

Many people assume that China will follow an imperialistic strategy and therefore be in direct conflict with the American empire in a quest for world domination. Jenny Clegg shows that China is in fact taking a multilateral approach, offering real assistance to developing countries and helping to build the institutions required to run a multipolar world. Without glossing over China's own internal difficulties, the book argues that its international consensus-building strategy could lead to a more peaceful and equitable world.

This book offers a refreshing perspective on China that will be of great value to those interested in the big political questions of how to tackle war and imperialism, globalisation and development as well as to undergraduate students of politics, economics and international relations.

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The Data Journalism Handbook
Towards A Critical Data Practice
Liliana Bounegru
Amsterdam University Press, 2021
The Data Journalism Handbook: Towards a Critical Data Practice provides a rich and panoramic introduction to data journalism, combining both critical reflection and practical insight. It offers a diverse collection of perspectives on how data journalism is done around the world and the broader consequences of datafication in the news, serving as both a textbook and a sourcebook for this emerging field. With more than 50 chapters from leading researchers and practitioners of data journalism, it explores the work needed to render technologies and data productive for journalistic purposes. It also gives a 'behind the scenes' look at the social lives of datasets, data infrastructures, and data stories in newsrooms, media organizations, startups, civil society organizations and beyond. The book includes sections on 'doing issues with data', 'assembling data', 'working with data', 'experiencing data', 'investigating data, platforms and algorithms', 'organizing data journalism', 'learning data journalism together' and 'situating data journalism'.
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The Emotional Life of Contemporary Public Memorials
Towards a Theory of Temporary Memorials
Erika Doss
Amsterdam University Press, 2008
From the commemoration of September 11 to the Holocaust memorial in Berlin to the 2004 unveiling of the National World War II Memorial in Washington D.C., recent decades have witnessed a substantial increase in the number of new public memorials built in both Europe and the United States. This volume considers the contemporary explosion of public commemoration in terms of changed cultural and social practices of mourning, memory, and public feeling. Positing memorials as the physical and visual embodiment of our affective responses to loss, Erika Doss focuses especially on the memorial ephemera of flowers, candles, balloons, and cards placed at sites of tragic death in order to better comprehend how grief is mediated in contemporary commemorative cultures.
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Foucault and Law
Towards a Sociology of Law As Governance
Alan Hunt and Gary Wickham
Pluto Press, 1994

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Ghostbodies
Towards a New Theory of Invalidism
Maia Dolphin-Krute
Intellect Books, 2017
How is illness represented in today’s cultural texts? In Ghostbodies, Maia Dolphin-Krute argues that the illusive sick body is often made invisible—a ghost—because it does not always fit society’s definition of disability. In these pages, she reflectively engages in a philosophical discussion of the lived experience of illness alongside an examination of how language and cultural constructions influence and represent this experience in a variety of forms. The book provides a linguistic mirror through which the reader may see his or her own specific invalidity reflected, enabling an examination of what it is like to live within a ghostbody. In the end, Dolphin-Krute asks—if illness is not what it seems, what then is health?
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Language of Tomorrow
Towards a Transcultural Visual Communication System in a Posthuman Condition
Haytham Nawar
Intellect Books, 2020

Language of Tomorrow is a comprehensive guide to the history, evolution, and current forms of pictographic communication, charting its course from ancient Egyptian writing systems to modern-day emojis. The book is a culmination of research combining visual communication, semiotic theory, cultural studies, linguistics, artificial intelligence, and new media.

Haytham Nawar presents a cohesive and comprehensive historical framework—covering pictographic, logographic, and ideographic writing systems and scripts—through which we can discuss the future of communication. In his analysis, he explores the possibility of developing a standardized universal pictographic communication system that fosters mutual understanding and bridges diverse cultures. Weaving practice and theory across disciplines and bringing together language, culture, art, and design, Language of Tomorrow aims to locate the direction for the research and development of a transcultural visual communication system for the posthuman era.

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Mental Models
Towards a Cognitive Science of Language, Inference, and Consciousness
Philip Johnson-Laird
Harvard University Press, 1983

Mental Models offers nothing less than a unified theory of the major properties of mind: comprehension, inference, and consciousness. In spirited and graceful prose, Johnson-Laird argues that we apprehend the world by building inner mental replicas of the relations among objects and events that concern us. The mind is essentially a model-building device that can itself be modeled on a digital computer. This book provides both a blueprint for building such a model and numerous important illustrations of how to do it.

In several key areas of cognition, Johnson-Laird shows how an explanation based on mental modeling is clearly superior to previous theory. For example, he argues compellingly that deductive reasoning does not take place by tacitly applying the rules of logic, but by mentally manipulating models of the states of affairs from which inferences are drawn. Similarly, linguistic comprehension is best understood not as a matter of applying inference rules to propositions derived from sentences, but rather as the mind's effort to construct and update a model of the situation described by a text or a discourse. Most provocative, perhaps, is Johnson-Laird's theory of consciousness: the mind's necessarily incomplete model of itself allows only a partial control over the many unconscious and parallel processes of cognition.

This an extraordinarily rich book, providing a coherent account of much recent experimental work in cognitive psychology, along with lucid explanations of relevant theory in linguistics, computer science, and philosophy Not since Miller, Galanter, and Pribram's classic Plans and the Structure of Behavior has a book in cognitive science combined such sweep, style, and good sense. Like its distinguished predecessor, Mental Models may well serve to fix a point of view for a generation.

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New Materials
Towards a History of Consistency
Amy E. Slaton
Lever Press, 2020
This edited volume gathers eight cases of industrial materials development, broadly conceived, from North America, Europe and Asia over the last 200 years. Whether given utility as building parts, fabrics, pharmaceuticals, or foodstuffs, whether seen by their proponents as human-made or “found in nature,” materials result from the designation of some matter as both knowable and worth knowing about. In following these determinations we learn that the production of physical novelty under industrial, imperial and other cultural conditions has historically accomplished a huge range of social effects, from accruals of status and wealth to demarcations of bodies and geographies. Among other cases, New Materials traces the beneficent self-identity of Quaker asylum planners who devised soundless metal cell locks in the early 19th century, and the inculcation of national pride attending Taiwanese carbon-fiber bicycle parts in the 21st; the racialized labor organizations promoted by California orange breeders in the 1910s, and bureaucratized distributions of blame for deadly high-rise fires a century later. Across eras and global regions New Materials reflects circumstances not made clear when technological innovation is explained solely as a by-product of modernizing impulses or critiqued simply as a craving for profit. Whether establishing the efficacy of nano-scale pharmaceuticals or the tastiness of farmed catfish, proponents of new materials enact complex political ideologies. In highlighting their actors’ conceptions of efficiency, certainty, safety, pleasure, pain, faith and identity, the authors reveal that to produce a “new material” is invariably to preserve other things, to sustain existing values and social structures.
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Personal Knowledge
Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy
Michael Polanyi
University of Chicago Press, 2015
The publication of Personal Knowledge in 1958 shook the science world, as Michael Polanyi took aim at the long-standing ideals of rigid empiricism and rule-bound logic. Today, Personal Knowledge remains one of the most significant philosophy of science books of the twentieth century, bringing the crucial concepts of “tacit knowledge” and “personal knowledge” to the forefront of inquiry.

In this remarkable treatise, Polanyi attests that our personal experiences and ways of sharing knowledge have a profound effect on scientific discovery. He argues against the idea of the wholly dispassionate researcher, pointing out that even in the strictest of sciences, knowing is still an art, and that personal commitment and passion are logically necessary parts of research. In our technological age where fact is split from value and science from humanity, Polanyi’s work continues to advocate for the innate curiosity and scientific leaps of faith that drive our most dazzling ingenuity.

For this expanded edition, Polyani scholar Mary Jo Nye set the philosopher-scientist’s work into contemporary context, offering fresh insights and providing a helpful guide to critical terms in the work. Used in fields as diverse as religious studies, chemistry, economics, and anthropology, Polanyi’s view of knowledge creation is just as relevant to intellectual endeavors today as when it first made waves more than fifty years ago.
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Personal Knowledge
Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy
Michael Polanyi
University of Chicago Press, 1974
In this work the distinguished physical chemist and philosopher, Michael Polanyi, demonstrates that the scientist's personal participation in his knowledge, in both its discovery and its validation, is an indispensable part of science itself. Even in the exact sciences, "knowing" is an art, of which the skill of the knower, guided by his personal commitment and his passionate sense of increasing contact with reality, is a logically necessary part. In the biological and social sciences this becomes even more evident.

The tendency to make knowledge impersonal in our culture has split fact from value, science from humanity. Polanyi wishes to substitute for the objective, impersonal ideal of scientific detachment an alternative ideal which gives attention to the personal involvement of the knower in all acts of understanding. His book should help to restore science to its rightful place in an integrated culture, as part of the whole person's continuing endeavor to make sense of the totality of his experience. In honor of this work and his The Study of Man Polanyi was presented with the Lecomte de Noüy Award for 1959.

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Place
Towards a Geophilosophy of Photography
Ali Shobeiri
Leiden University Press, 2021
A new theoretical perspective on place in photography.
 
Drawing on theoretical insights from geography and philosophy, Ali Shobeiri examines how six fundamentals of photography—the photographer, camera, photograph, image, spectator, and genre—manifest unique, contingent notions of “place.” The geophilosophy that emerges offers a new language for understanding how “place” encapsulates everything that invites and resists location, identity, story, function, and meaning.
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Power & Persuasion Late Antiquity
Towards A Christian Empire
Peter Brown
University of Wisconsin Press, 1992
Peter Brown, perhaps the greatest living authority on Mediterranean civilization in late antiquity, traces the growing power of Christian bishops as they wrested influence from philosophers, who had traditionally advised the rulers of Graeco-Roman society.  In the new “Christian empire,” the ancient bonds of citizen to citizen and of each city to its benefactors were replaced by a common Christianity and common loyalty to a distant, Christian autocrat.  This transformation of the Roman empire from an ancient to a medieval society, he argues, is among the most far-reaching consequences of the rise of Christianity.
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Roy Pascal and Georg Lukács
Towards a Re-Evaluation of the History of Marxist Literary Criticism in Britain?
Helmut Peitsch
University of London Press, 2018

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Society and Nature
Towards a Green Social Theory
Peter Dickens
Temple University Press, 1992
In this wide-ranging effort to theorize about the relationships between society and nature, Peter Dickens attempts to reconstruct social theory in a way that enables it to speak to contemporary environmental issues. After reviewing existing sociological traditions, he draws on the early work of Karl Marx to suggest that processes and relations in the workplace are the main source of people's separation from nature. In addition, people's understanding of "nature" tends to mirror their experience of the social world. Redefining the work of Anthony Giddens in an ecological direction, Dickens analyzes developments in biological thinking that seem consistent with this approach. He considers the role of culture, and he critiques the contemporary "deep green" and "deep ecology" movements. Focusing on the alienation of human begins from the natural world and the place of nature in their "deep mental structures," the author works in part from a Marxist perspective but draws a wide variety of social psychological, and biological theories into the discussion. Society and Nature not only addresses a central debate in contemporary social science regarding this interrelationship but also responds to the intellectual challenge presented by natural scientific concepts of environmental problems that oversimplify or ignore their political or social relational dimensions.
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Softimage
Towards a New Theory of the Digital Image
Ingrid Hoelzl and Remi Marie
Intellect Books, 2015
With today’s digital technology, the image is no longer a stable representation of the world, but a programmable view of a database that is updated in real time. It no longer functions as a political and iconic representation, but plays a vital role in synchronic data-to-data relationships. It is not only part of a program, but it contains its own operating code: the image is a program in itself. Softimage aims to account for that new reality, taking readers on a journey that gradually undoes our unthinking reliance on the apparent solidity of the photographic image and building in its place an original and timely theorization of the digital image in all its complexity, one that promises to spark debate within the evolving fields of image studies and software studies.
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Towards a Christian Philosophy
Joseph Owens
Catholic University of America Press, 2018
Brings together a lifetime of work on the problems presented by the notion of a Christian philosophy, debates whether a Christian philosophy is possible, and outlines the steps for its development.
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Towards a Cognitive Mode in Global Finance?
The Governance of a Knowledge-Based Financial System
Edited by Torsten Strulik and Helmut Willke
Campus Verlag, 2007
The global finance system has been the subject of hot debate for several years. Major players such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank have come under fire for their financial practices, while the role of epistemic authorities, including rating agencies, remains unclear. This book systematically analyzes the role knowledge plays in global finance reform by considering its influence in the empirical areas of finance (banking, accounting, and bond rating, for example). As the contributors demonstrate, current institutional management strategies reflect a shift toward “cognitive,” or learning-based modes of managing financial and political risks—and this cognitive thinking has its own consequences for the global marketplace.
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Towards a Data-Driven Military
A Multidisciplinary Perspective
Peter B.M.J. Pijpers
Leiden University Press, 2023
Towards a Data-Driven Military: A Multidisciplinary Perspective assesses the use of data and information on modern conflict from different scientific and methodological disciplines, aiming to generate valuable contributions to the ongoing discourse on data, the military and modern warfare. Part one, ‘Military Systems and Technology’,, approaches the theme empirically by researching how data can enhance the utility of military materiel and subsequently accelerate the decision-making process. Part two, ‘War Studies’, takes a multidisciplinary approach to the evolution of warfare, while the third part, ‘Military Management Studies’, takes a holistic organisational and procedural approach. Based on their scientific protocols and research methods, the three domains put forward different research questions and perspectives, providing the unique character of this book.
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Towards a Decent Labour Market for Low-Waged Migrant Workers
Edited by Conny Rijken and Tesseltje de Lange
Amsterdam University Press, 2018
Central to this edited volume is the legal position and the labour situation of non-EU and EU low-waged migrant workers. Towards a Decent Labour Market for Low-Waged Migrant Workers presents ground breaking research on policies and practices in search of striking a right balance between the economic ambitions and the negative consequences thereof, for labour market dynamics such as down-ward wage pressures, unfair competition, the abuse of migrant workers and even the long-term setback for the children of previously low-waged migrant workers. Imbalances or presumed imbalances between free market mechanisms, labour migrationpolicies, labour market protection and corrective mechanisms to protect migrant workers, thus come to the fore. The contributors to this volume will deconstruct some of these imbalances, and shed light on its causes, consequences and interrelatedness with other factors. Possible solutions that contribute to a decent labour market, in which rights of low-waged migrant workers are more respected, will be discussed.
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Towards a Gay Communism
Elements of a Homosexual Critique
Mario Mieli
Pluto Press, 2018

First published in Italian in 1977, Mario Mieli's groundbreaking book is an early landmark of revolutionary queer theory - now available for the first time in a complete and unabridged English translation.

Among the most important works ever to address the relationship between homosexuality, homophobia and capitalism, Mieli's essay continues to pose a radical challenge to today's dominant queer theory and politics.

With extraordinary prescience, Mieli exposes the efficiency with which capitalism co-opts 'perversions' which are then 'sold both wholesale and retail'. In his view the liberation of homosexual desire requires the emancipation of sexuality from both patriarchal sex roles and capital.

Drawing heavily upon Marx and psychoanalysis to arrive at a dazzlingly original vision, Towards a Gay Communism is a hitherto neglected classic that will be essential reading for all who seek to understand the true meaning of sexual liberation under capitalism today.

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Towards a Global Core Value System in Doctoral Education
Edited by Maresi Nerad, David Bogle, Ulrike Kohl, Conor O’Carroll, Christian Peters, and Beate Scholz
University College London, 2022
Globalization and doctoral education in the twenty-first century.

This book provides an evaluation of changes and reforms in doctoral education since 2000. Recent decades have seen an explosion in doctoral education worldwide, and the increased potential for diverse employment has generated greater interest. Recognizing the diversity of academic cultures and institutional systems worldwide, the book advocates for a core value system to overcome inequalities in access to doctoral education. The chapters focus on the structures and quality assurance models of doctoral education, supervision, and funding from an institutional and comparative perspective. The book examines capacity building in the era of globalization, global labor market developments for doctoral graduates, and the ethical challenges and political contestations that may manifest in the process of pursuing a PhD.
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Towards a New Ethnohistory
Community-Engaged Scholarship among the People of the River
Keith Thor Carlson
University of Manitoba Press, 2018

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Towards a New Malaysia?
The 2018 Election and Its Aftermath
Meredith L. Weiss and Faizal S. Hazis
National University of Singapore Press, 2020
Malaysia’s stunning 2018 election brought down a ruling party that had held power since independence in 1957, marking the first regime change in the country’s history. This book tells the full story of this historic election (officially called the 14th Malaysian General Election or GE14), combining a sharp analysis of the voting data with consideration of the key issues, campaign strategies, and mobilization efforts that played out during the election period. This analysis is then used to bring fresh ideas and perspectives to the core debates about Malaysian political ideas, identities and behaviors, debates that continue to shape the country’s destiny.

After the election, many Malaysians were optimistic about the possibility of a more representative, accountable, participatory, and equitable polity, but Meredith L. Weiss and Faisal S. Hazis do not see GE14 as a clear harbinger of full-on liberalization. While the political aftermath of the election continues to play out, the authors provide a clarion call for deeper, more critical, more comparative research on Malaysia’s politics. They upend commonly held beliefs about Malaysian politics and bring forward lesser-known theories, and they suggest agendas for empirically interesting, theoretically relevant further research. They also point to the broader insights Malaysia’s experience provides for the study of elections and political change in one-party dominant states around the world.
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Towards a Philosophy of Photography
Vilém Flusser
Reaktion Books, 1983
Media philosopher Vilém Flusser proposed a revolutionary new way of thinking about photography. An analysis of the medium in terms of aesthetics, science and politics provided him with new ways of understanding both the cultural crises of the past and the new social forms nascent within them. Flusser showed how the transformation of textual into visual culture (from the linearity of history into the two-dimensionality of magic) and of industrial into post-industrial society (from work into leisure) went hand in hand, and how photography allows us to read and interpret these changes with particular clarity.
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Towards a Political Aesthetics of Cinema
The Outside of Film
Sulgi Lie
Amsterdam University Press, 2020
Towards a Political Aesthetics of Cinema: The Outside of Film is a contribution to an aesthetics of cinema rooted in Marxist theory. Rather than focusing on the role that certain films, or the cinema as an institution, might play in political consciousness, the book asks a different question: how can the subject of politics in film be thought? This problem is presented in a systematic-theoretical rather than historical manner. The main aim of this book is a retrospective rehabilitation of the psychoanalytical concept of "suture," whose political core is progressively revealed. In a second step, this rereading of "suture"-theory is mediated with the Marxist aesthetics of Fredric Jameson. From the perspective of this reconfigured aesthetics of negativity, films by Hitchcock, Antonioni, Haneke and Kubrick are analyzed as articulations of a political unconscious.
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Towards a Praxis-based Media and Journalism Research
Edited by Leon Barkho
Intellect Books, 2017
This volume brings together current scholarly debates about how to bridge the gap between theory and practice in media and journalism research. Drawing on work from media scholars and media practitioners that focuses on how both sides can work together for the good of society, Towards a Praxis-based Media and Journalism Research is the first collection to examine how theory and practice can be combined for positive effect. The result will lay important groundwork for scholarship on this new and increasingly important idea in media and communication studies.
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Towards a Romanian Silicon Valley?
Local Development in Post-Socialist Europe
Enikö Baga
Campus Verlag, 2007
This book examines local attempts at sustainable development in post-socialist Eastern Europe. Enikö Baga focuses on the small Romanian town of Timisoara as its residents respond to major national and international changes, including the dismantling of an authoritarian regime and Romania’s admittance to the European Union in 2007. As Baga illustrates, such shifts provide powerful opportunities for local communities, as they learn to use their own economic, social, and cultural resources to enact political change. A unique look at grassroots development efforts in Eastern Europe, this book will be an important study for scholars and students of economics and comparative politics.
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Towards a Society That Serves Its People
The Intellectual Contribution of El Salvador's Murdered Jesuits
John Hassett and Hugh Lacey, Editors
Georgetown University Press, 1991

This collection presents a representative sample of the writings of three of the six Jesuits who were slain in El Salvador on November 16, 1989. Although little known in the United States, these men were significant scholars who possessed an original conception of the university. They affirmed in difficult circumstances, the pursuit and teaching of truth as a collaborative, collegial process that transcends international boundaries.

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Towards a Sustainable Information Society
Deconstructing WSIS
Edited by Nico Carpentier and Jan Servaes
Intellect Books, 1995
The Information Society is one of the recurrent imaginaries to describe present-day structures, discourses and practices. Within its meaning is enshrined the promise of a better world, sometimes naively assuming a technological deus ex machina, in other cases hoping for the creation of policy tools that will overcome a diversity of societal divides.

With the two-phased World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS), the United Nations attempted to stimulate the development of such tools.
Simultaneously, the WSIS is a large-scale experiment in multistakeholderism. The objective was to create a more balanced decision-making process that would allow the voices of civil society and business actors to be heard in international politics.

This book aims to evaluate the potentialities of both the Information Society, and the WSIS in supporting and constructing more democratic, just and developed societies. It is the second book arising from the intellectual work of European Consortium for Communications Research members.
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Towards an Aesthetics of Production
Sebastian Egenhofer
Diaphanes, 2017
Throughout the twentieth century, art history has been too narrowly focused on formalism. As a result, analyses regularly reduced works of art to their materials, texture, and composition. By contrast, art historian Sebastian Egenhofer takes Gilles Deleuze’s readings of Spinoza, Nietzsche, and Bergson as the basis for a new resistance to the overly reductive account of art history. 
           
After laying out his argument for a new aesthetics of production in introductory chapters that discuss the work of Spinoza, Nietzsche, and Bergson, as well as Heidegger and Kant, Egenhofer applies this theoretical framework to case studies on Michael Asher, Marcel Duchamp, Thomas Hirschhorn, and Piet Mondrian. An aesthetics of production does not, he argues, imply a nostalgia for the artisanal or for a work of art’s singularity, but a way to bring together elements of critical materialism with a thorough reevaluation of the modern art and abstraction.
 
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Towards the Ethics of Form in Fiction
Narratives of Cultural Remission
Leona Toker
The Ohio State University Press, 2010

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Transforming Early Childhood in England
Towards a Democratic Education
Edited by Claire Cameron and Peter Moss
University College London, 2020
Early childhood education and care has been a political priority in England since 1997, after a long period of neglect. Public funding has increased, and political parties aim to outbid each other in their offerings to families at each election. Transforming Early Childhood in England argues that, despite this attention, the system of early childhood services remains flawed and dysfunctional. National discourse is dominated by questions of the cost and availability of childcare, while a devalued workforce is characterized by a culture of quantifiable targets and measurement. With such deep-rooted problems, Claire Cameron and Peter Moss argue, early childhood education in England needs more than minor improvements. In the context of austerity measures affecting many young families, transformative change is urgent.
 
Transforming Early Childhood in England offers a critical analysis of the current system and proposes change based on a universal right to education. The book calls for revisions built on democratic principles, where all learning by all children is visible and recognized, educators are trusted and respected, and outcomes-driven targets are replaced. Combining criticism and hope, and drawing on inspiring research, the book is essential reading for students, educators, practitioners, parents, academics, and policymakers.
 
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The Unrealizable
Towards a Politics of Ontology
Giorgio Agamben
Seagull Books, 2024
A patient, genealogical investigation of the dichotomies that are foundational to the Western philosophical tradition.

We are so used to distinguishing between the possible and the real, between essence and existence that we do not realize that these distinctions, which seem so obvious to us, are the result of a long and laborious process that has led to the splitting of being—the “matter” of thought—into two fragments that are both conflicting and intimately intertwined.

This book argues that the ontological-political machine of the West is based on the splitting of this “matter,” without which neither science nor politics would be possible. Without the partition of reality into essence and existence and into possibility and actuality, neither scientific knowledge nor the ability to control human action—which characterizes the historical power of the West—would have been possible.

If we could not suspend the exclusive concentration of our attention on what immediately exists (as animals seem to do), to think and define its essence, Western science and technology would not have experienced the advances that characterize them. And if the dimension of possibility disappeared entirely, neither plans nor projects would be thinkable, and human actions could be neither directed nor controlled. The incomparable power of the West has one of its essential presuppositions in this ontological machine.
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Voyages and Visions
Towards a Cultural History of Travel
Edited by Jás Elsner and Joan-Pau Rubiés
Reaktion Books, 1999
A much-needed contribution to the expanding interest in the history of travel and travel writing, Voyages and Visions is the first attempt to sketch a cultural history of travel from the sixteenth century to the present day. The essays address the theme of travel as a historical, literary and imaginative process, focusing on significant episodes and encounters in world history.

The contributors to this collection include historians of art and of science, anthropologists, literary critics and mainstream cultural historians. Their essays encompass a challenging range of subjects, including the explorations of South America, India and Mexico; mountaineering in the Himalayas; space travel; science fiction; and American post-war travel fiction. Voyages and Visions is truly interdisciplinary, and essential reading for anyone interested in travel writing.

With essays by Kasia Boddy, Michael Bravo, Peter Burke, Melissa Calaresu, Jesus Maria Carillo Castillo, Peter Hansen, Edward James, Nigel Leask, Joan-Pau Rubies and Wes Williams.
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