Les Back: Academic Diary, or Why Higher Education Still Matters (2016)
Filed under book | Tags: · academia, diary, education, scholarship, sociology, university
“Les Back has chronicled three decades of his academic career, turning his sharp and often satirical eye to the everyday aspects of life on campus and the larger forces that are reshaping it. Presented as a collection of entries from a single academic year, the diary moves from the local to the global, from PowerPoint to the halls of power. With entries like Ivory Towers and The Library Angel, these smart, humorous and sometimes absurd campus tales not only demystify the opaque rituals of scholarship, they offer a personal route into the far-reaching issues of university life. From the impact of commercialisation and fee increases to measurement and auditing research, the diary offers a critical diagnosis of higher education today. At the same time, it is a passionate argument for the life of the mind, the importance of collaborative thinking and why scholarship and writing are still vital for making sense of our troubled and divided world.”
Publisher Goldsmiths Press, London, 2016
Open access
ISBN 9781906897581, 1906897581
xiii+258 pages
Reviews: Rose Deller (LSE Review of Books, 2016), Andrew Robinson (Times Higher Education, 2016), Rosalind Gill (Int’l J Politics, Culture, and Society, 2018), Bridget Hanna.
Book website (archived)
Publisher
WorldCat
Noortje Marres, Michael Guggenheim, Alex Wilkie (eds.): Inventing the Social (2018)
Filed under book | Tags: · design, life, research, social science, society, sociology
“Inventing the Social showcases recent efforts to develop new ways of knowing society that combine social research with creative practice. With contributions from leading figures in sociology, architecture, geography, design, anthropology, and digital media, the book provides practical and conceptual pointers on how to move beyond the customary distinctions between knowledge and art, and on how to connect the doing, researching and making of social life in potentially new ways.
Presenting concrete projects with a creative approach to researching social life as well as reflections on the wider contexts from which these projects emerge, this collection shows how collaboration across social science, digital media and the arts opens up timely alternatives to narrow, instrumentalist proposals that seek to engineer behaviour and to design community from scratch. To invent the social is to recognise that social life is always already creative in itself and to take this as a starting point for developing different ways of combining representation and intervention in social life.”
Publisher Mattering Press, Manchester, 2018
Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0 License
ISBN 099552775X, 9780995527751
334 pages
Judy Wajcman: TechnoFeminism (2004–) [EN, ES]
Filed under book | Tags: · cyberfeminism, cyberspace, cyborg, feminism, gender, sexuality, sociology, technology, technoscience, women
“This timely and engaging book argues that technoscientific advances are radically transforming the woman-machine relationship. However, it is feminist politics rather than the technologies themselves that make the difference. TechnoFeminism fuses the visionary insights of cyberfeminism with a materialist analysis of the sexual politics of technology.”
Publisher Polity Press, 2004
ISBN 9780745630441, 0745630448
viii+148 pages
Reviews: Martha McCaughey (American Journal of Sociology, 2006), Rosalind Gill (Science as Culture, 2005), Sarah M. Brown (NWSA Journal, 2007), Eva Patricia Gil (UOC Papers, 2007, Spanish), Isabel Clúa (n.d., Spanish).
Wikipedia (EN)
Publisher (EN)
WorldCat (EN)
TechnoFeminism (English, 30 MB)
El tecnofeminismo (Spanish, trans. Magalí Martínez Solimán, 2006, via)
See also Wajcman’s Feminism Confronts Technology, 1991.
Comment (0)