Risky Bodies & Techno-Intimacy

by Geeta Patel
Risky Bodies & Techno-Intimacy
Author: Geeta Patel
Publisher: University of Washington Press
Total Pages: 389
Release: 2017-08-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 029574250X
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Risky Bodies and Techno-Intimacy traverses disparate and uncommon routes to explore how people grapple with the radical uncertainties of their lives. In this edgy, evocative journey through myriad interleaved engagements—including the political economies of cinema; the emergent shapes taken by insurance, debt, and mortgages; gender and sexuality; and domesticity and nationalism—Geeta Patel demonstrates how science and technology ground our everyday intimacies. The result is a deeply poetic and philosophical exploration of the intricacies of techno-intimacy, revealing a complicated and absorbing narrative that challenges assumptions underlying our daily living.

Global Debates in the Digital Humanities

by Domenico Fiormonte
Global Debates in the Digital Humanities
Author: Domenico Fiormonte
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
Total Pages: 341
Release: 2022-04-12
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1452967105
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A necessary volume of essays working to decolonize the digital humanities Often conceived of as an all-inclusive “big tent,” digital humanities has in fact been troubled by a lack of perspectives beyond Westernized and Anglophone contexts and assumptions. This latest collection in the Debates in the Digital Humanities series seeks to address this deficit in the field. Focused on thought and work that has been underappreciated for linguistic, cultural, or geopolitical reasons, contributors showcase alternative histories and perspectives that detail the rise of the digital humanities in the Global South and other “invisible” contexts and explore the implications of a globally diverse digital humanities. Advancing a vision of the digital humanities as a space where we can reimagine basic questions about our cultural and historical development, this volume challenges the field to undertake innovation and reform. Contributors: Maria José Afanador-Llach, U de los Andes, Bogotá; Maira E. Álvarez, U of Houston; Purbasha Auddy, Jadavpur U; Diana Barreto Ávila, U of British Columbia; Deepti Bharthur, IT for Change; Sayan Bhattacharyya, Singapore U of Technology and Design; Anastasia Bonch-Osmolovskaya, National Research U Higher School of Economics; Jing Chen, Nanjing U; Carlton Clark, Kazimieras Simonavičius U, Vilnius; Carolina Dalla Chiesa, Erasmus U, Rotterdam; Gimena del Rio Riande, Institute of Bibliographic Research and Textual Criticism; Leonardo Foletto, U of São Paulo; Rahul K. Gairola, Murdoch U; Sofia Gavrilova, Leibniz Institute for Regional Geography; Andre Goodrich, North-West U; Anita Gurumurthy, IT for Change; Aliz Horvath, Eötvös Loránd U; Igor Kim, Russian Academy of Sciences; Inna Kizhner, Siberian Federal U; Cédric Leterme, Tricontinental Center; Andres Lombana-Bermudez, Pontificia, U Javeriana, Bogotá; Lev Manovich, City U of New York; Itay Marienberg-Milikowsky, Ben-Gurion U of the Negev; Maciej Maryl, Polish Academy of Sciences; Nirmala Menon, Indian Institute of Technology, Indore; Boris Orekhov, National Research U Higher School of Economics; Ernesto Priego, U of London; Sylvia Fernández Quintanilla, U of Kansas; Nuria Rodríguez-Ortega, U of Málaga; Steffen Roth, U of Turku; Dibyadyuti Roy, Indian Institute of Technology, Jodhpur; Maxim Rumyantsev, Siberian Federal U; Puthiya Purayil Sneha, Centre for Internet and Society, Bengaluru; Juan Steyn, South African Centre for Digital Language Resources; Melissa Terras, U of Edinburgh; Ernesto Miranda Trigueros, U of the Cloister of Sor Juana; Lik Hang Tsui, City U of Hong Kong; Tim Unwin, U of London; Lei Zhang, U of Wisconsin–La Crosse.

Risky Futures

by Olga Ulturgasheva
Risky Futures
Author: Olga Ulturgasheva
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Total Pages: 234
Release: 2022-08-12
Genre: Nature
ISBN: 1800735944
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The volume examines complex intersections of environmental conditions, geopolitical tensions and local innovative reactions characterising ‘the Arctic’ in the early twenty-first century. What happens in the region (such as permafrost thaw or methane release) not only sweeps rapidly through local ecosystems but also has profound global implications. Bringing together a unique combination of authors who are local practitioners, indigenous scholars and international researchers, the book provides nuanced views of the social consequences of climate change and environmental risks across human and non-human realms.

Indian Sex Life

by Durba Mitra
Indian Sex Life
Author: Durba Mitra
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 302
Release: 2020-01-07
Genre: History
ISBN: 0691197024
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How British authorities and Indian intellectuals developed ideas about deviant female sexuality to control and organize modern society in India During the colonial period in India, European scholars, British officials, and elite Indian intellectuals—philologists, administrators, doctors, ethnologists, sociologists, and social critics—deployed ideas about sexuality to understand modern Indian society. In Indian Sex Life, Durba Mitra shows how deviant female sexuality, particularly the concept of the prostitute, became foundational to this knowledge project and became the primary way to think and write about Indian society. Bringing together vast archival materials from diverse disciplines, Mitra reveals that deviant female sexuality was critical to debates about social progress and exclusion, caste domination, marriage, widowhood and inheritance, women's performance, the trafficking of girls, abortion and infanticide, industrial and domestic labor, indentured servitude, and ideologies about the dangers of Muslim sexuality. British authorities and Indian intellectuals used the concept of the prostitute to argue for the dramatic reorganization of modern Indian society around Hindu monogamy. Mitra demonstrates how the intellectual history of modern social thought is based in a dangerous civilizational logic built on the control and erasure of women's sexuality. This logic continues to hold sway in present-day South Asia and the postcolonial world. Reframing the prostitute as a concept, Indian Sex Life overturns long-established notions of how to write the history of modern social thought in colonial India, and opens up new approaches for the global history of sexuality.

Unruly Figures

by Navaneetha Mokkil
Unruly Figures
Author: Navaneetha Mokkil
Publisher: University of Washington Press
Total Pages: 285
Release: 2019-05-02
Genre: History
ISBN: 0295745568
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The vibrant media landscape in the southern Indian state of Kerala, where kiosks overflow with magazines and colorful film posters line roadside walls, creates a sexually charged public sphere that has a long history of political protests. The 2014 “Kiss of Love” campaign garnered national attention, sparking controversy as images of activists kissing in public and dragged into police vans flooded the media. In Unruly Figures, Navaneetha Mokkil tracks the cultural practices through which sexual figures—particularly the sex worker and the lesbian—are produced in the public imagination. Her analysis includes representations of the prostitute figure in popular media, trajectories of queerness in Malayalam films, public discourse on lesbian sexuality, the autobiographical project of sex worker and activist Nalini Jameela, and the memorialization of murdered transgender activist Sweet Maria, showing how various marginalized figures stage their own fractured journeys of resistance in the post-1990s context of globalization. By bringing a substantial body of Malayalam-language literature and media texts on gender, sexuality, and social justice into conversation with current debates around sexuality studies and transnational feminism in Asian and Anglo-American academia, Mokkil reorients the debates on sexuality in India by considering the fraught trajectories of identity and rights.

Sexuality, Abjection and Queer Existence in Contemporary India

by Pushpesh Kumar
Sexuality, Abjection and Queer Existence in Contemporary India
Author: Pushpesh Kumar
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 254
Release: 2021-07-29
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1000415880
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This volume explores existing and emerging sexual cultures of contemporary India and the predicaments faced by abjected and sexual marginalities. It traces the sexual politics within popular culture, literary genres, advertisement, consumerism, globalizing cities, social movements, law, scientific research, the Hijra community life, (alternative) families and kinship and sites that define the cultural other whose sexual practices or identities fall beyond normative moral conventions. The chapters examine a range of connected sociological and political issues including questions of agency, judgments around intimate sexual relationships, the role of the state, popular understandings of adolescent romance, notion of legitimacy and stigma, moral policing and resistance, body politics and marginality, representations in popular and folk culture, sexual violence and freedom, problems with historiography, structural inequalities, queer erotica, gay consumerism, Hijra suicides and marriage and divorce. The volume also proposes certain transformative possibilities towards envisioning and (re)scripting sexual equalities. This interdisciplinary book will be important for those interested in sexuality studies, queer studies, gender studies, cultural studies, sociology, law, history, literature and Global South studies as well as policymakers, civil society activists and nongovernmental organizations working in the area.

Practices of Speculation

by Jeanne Cortiel
Practices of Speculation
Author: Jeanne Cortiel
Publisher: transcript Verlag
Total Pages: 285
Release: 2020-12-31
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 3839447518
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This volume offers innovative ways to think about speculation at a time when anticipation of catastrophe in an apocalyptic mode is the order of the day and shapes public discourse on a global scale. It maps an interdisciplinary field of investigation: the chapters interrogate hegemonic ways of shaping the present through investments in the future, while also looking at speculative practices that reveal transformative potential. The twelve contributions explore concrete instances of envisioning the open unknown and affirmative speculative potentials in history, literature, comics, computer games, mold research, ecosystem science and artistic practice.

Abundance

by Anjali Arondekar
Abundance
Author: Anjali Arondekar
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 115
Release: 2023-06-30
Genre: History
ISBN: 1478024488
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In Abundance, Anjali Arondekar refuses the historical common sense that archival loss is foundational to a subaltern history of sexuality, and that the deficit of our minoritized pasts can be redeemed through acquisitions of lost pasts. Instead, Arondekar theorizes the radical abundance of sexuality through the archives of the Gomantak Maratha Samaj—a caste-oppressed devadasi collective in South Asia—that are plentiful and quotidian, imaginative and ordinary. For Arondekar, abundance is inextricably linked to the histories of subordinated groups in ways that challenge narratives of their constant devaluation. Summoning abundance over loss upends settled genealogies of historical recuperation and representation and works against the imperative to fix sexuality within wider structures of vulnerability, damage, and precarity. Multigeneric and multilingual, transregional and historically supple, Abundance centers sexuality within area, post/colonial, and anti/caste histories.