Crafting Knowledge and Knowledge of Crafts PDF Download

Author: Deepali Dewan
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 540

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Author: Dagmar Schäfer
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226735850
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 353

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Book Description
The last decades of the Ming dynasty, though plagued by chaos and destruction, saw a significant increase of publications that examined advances in knowledge and technology. Among the numerous guides and reference books that appeared during this period was a series of texts by Song Yingxing (1587–1666?), a minor local official living in southern China. His Tiangong kaiwu, the longest and most prominent of these works, documents the extraction and processing of raw materials and the manufacture of goods essential to everyday life, from yeast and wine to paper and ink to boats, carts, and firearms. In The Crafting of the 10,000 Things, Dagmar Schäfer probes this fascinating text and the legacy of its author to shed new light on the development of scientific thinking in China, the purpose of technical writing, and its role in and effects on Chinese history. Meticulously unfolding the layers of Song’s personal and cultural life, Schäfer chronicles the factors that motivated Song to transform practical knowledge into written culture. She then examines how Song gained, assessed, and ultimately presented knowledge, and in doing so articulates this era’s approaches to rationality, truth, and belief in the study of nature and culture alike. Finally, Schäfer places Song’s efforts in conjunction with the work of other Chinese philosophers and writers, before, during, and after his time, and argues that these writings demonstrate collectively a uniquely Chinese way of authorizing technology as a legitimate field of scholarly concern and philosophical knowledge. Offering an overview of a thousand years of scholarship, The Crafting of the 10,000 Things explains the role of technology and crafts in a culture that had an outstandingly successful tradition in this field and was a crucial influence on the technical development of Europe on the eve of the Industrial Revolution.

Author: Richard Gunstone
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 9789400721494
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 1120

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Book Description
The Encyclopedia of Science Education provides a comprehensive international reference work covering the range of methodologies, perspectives, foci, and cultures of this field of inquiry, and to do so via contributions from leading researchers from around the globe. Because of the frequent ways in which scholarship in science education has led to developments in other curriculum areas, the encyclopedia has significance beyond the field of science education. The Encyclopedia of Science Education is aimed at graduate students, researchers, developers in science education and science education research. The topics to be covered encompass all areas of science education and it includes biographical entries on science educators, as well as educators whose work has had an impact on science education as a research field.

Author: C. Smart
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137287349
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 177

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This book is a contribution to contemporary debates on social research with a unique focus on the relationship between methods and the crafting of knowledge. Nine experienced researchers from different disciplines have come together to explore what really matters to them in the process of doing qualitative research.

Author: Elizabeth Garber
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 9781138896192
Category : Arts and crafts movement
Languages : en
Pages : 254

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Makers, Crafters, Educators brings the do-it-yourself (DIY) ethos of maker and crafter movements into educational environments, and examines the politics of cultural change that undergird them. Addressing making and crafting in relationship to community and schooling practices, culture and place, this edited collection positions making as an agent of change in education. In the volume¿s five sections¿Play and Hacking, Access and Equity, Interdependence and Interdisciplinarity, Cultural and Environmental Sustainability, and Labor and Leisure¿authors from around the world present a collage of issues and practices connecting object making, participatory culture, and socio-cultural transformation. Offering gateways into cultural practices from six continents, this volume explores the participatory culture of maker and crafter spaces in education and reveals how community sites hold the promise of such socio-cultural transformation.

Author: Richard Sennett
Publisher: Penguin UK
ISBN: 0141919418
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 345

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Why do people work hard, and take pride in what they do? This book, a philosophically-minded enquiry into practical activity of many different kinds past and present, is about what happens when people try to do a good job. It asks us to think about the true meaning of skill in the 'skills society' and argues that pure competition is a poor way to achieve quality work. Sennett suggests, instead, that there is a craftsman in every human being, which can sometimes be enormously motivating and inspiring - and can also in other circumstances make individuals obsessive and frustrated. The Craftsman shows how history has drawn fault-lines between craftsman and artist, maker and user, technique and expression, practice and theory, and that individuals' pride in their work, as well as modern society in general, suffers from these historical divisions. But the past lives of crafts and craftsmen show us ways of working (using tools, acquiring skills, thinking about materials) which provide rewarding alternative ways for people to utilise their talents. We need to recognise this if motivations are to be understood and lives made as fulfilling as possible.

Author: Katharina Rebay-Salisbury
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135014450
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 225

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This edited volume investigates knowledge networks based on materials and associated technologies in Prehistoric Europe and the Classical Mediterranean. It emphasises the significance of material objects to the construction, maintenance, and collapse of networks of various forms – which are central to explanations of cultural contact and change. Focusing on the materiality of objects and on the way in which materials are used adds a multidimensional quality to networks. The properties, functions, and styles of different materials are intrinsically linked to the way in which knowledge flows and technologies are transmitted. Transmission of technologies from one craft to another is one of the main drivers of innovation, whilst sharing knowledge is enabled and limited by the extent of associated social networks in place. Archaeological research has often been limited to studying objects made of one particular material in depth, be it lithic materials, ceramics, textiles, glass, metal, wood or others. The knowledge flow and transfer between crafts that deal with different materials have often been overlooked. This book takes a fresh approach to the reconstruction of knowledge networks by integrating two or more craft traditions in each of its chapters. The authors, well-known experts and early career researchers, provide concise case studies that cover a wide range of materials. The scope of the book extends from networks of craft traditions to implications for society in a wider sense: materials, objects, and the technologies used to make and distribute them are interwoven with social meaning. People make objects, but objects make people – the materiality of objects shapes our understanding of the world and our place within it. In this book, objects are treated as clues to social networks of different sorts that can be contrasted and compared, both spatially and diachronically.

Author: Malcolm McCullough
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 9780262631891
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 336

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Book Description
In this investigation of the possibility of craft in the digital realm, the author discusses the emergence of computation as a medium, rather than just a set of tools, suggesting a growing correspondence between digital work and traditional craft.

Author: Pamela H. Smith
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226818241
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 353

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"This book focuses on how literate artisans began to write about their discoveries starting around 1400: in other words, it explores the origins of technical writing. Artisans and artists began to publish handbooks, guides, treatises, tip sheets, graphs and recipe books rather than simply pass along their knowledge in the workshop. And they tried to articulate what the new knowledge meant. The popularity of these texts coincided with the founding of a "new philosophy" that sought to investigate nature in a new way. Smith shows how this moment began in the unceasing trials of the craft workshop, and ended in the experimentation of the natural scientific laboratory. These epistemological developments have continued to the present day and still inform how we think about scientific knowledge"--

Author: Petra Tjitske Kalshoven
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 0857453459
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 299

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In Europe, Indian hobbyism, or Indianism, has developed out of a strong fascination with Native American life in the 18th and 19th centuries. “Indian hobbyists” dress in homemade replicas of clothing, craft museum-quality replicas of artifacts, meet in fields dotted with tepees and reenact aspects of North American Indian lifeworlds, using ethnographies, travel diaries, and museum collections as resources. Grounded in fieldwork set among networks of Indian hobbyists in Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, France, and the Czech Republic, this ethnography analyzes this contemporary practice of serious leisure with respect to the general human desire for play, metaphor, and allusion. It provides insights into the increasing popularity of reenactment practices as they relate to a deeper understanding of human perception, imagination, and creativity.