Author: Katharine Dow Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 135133347X Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 160
Book Description
How we dispose of our rubbish, choose the foods we buy, enjoy art, relate to our families, and think about ourselves are just a few of the ways that ideas about nature shape our everyday ethical decisions. Nature and ‘natural facts’ have long been used to make sense of why we act a certain way. Nature is a concept with great power: when we describe something as ‘natural’ or ‘unnatural’, it has a moral force and political consequences. We see this in moral panics about genetically modified foods, the spread of government-enforced waste recycling schemes, concerns about assisted reproductive technologies. Our ideas about what is natural shape our ethical thinking, in terms of how people live (or want to live) their lives, but also in guiding our sense of morality, justice and truth. The idea of naturalness is essential to grasping Anglo-American cultures. Throughout history and in different places, nature has had different forms, meanings, and moral valences. It is a knowable fact, but at the same time almost a divine principle that is ultimately unfathomable. Yet with the rise of new technologies, there is increasing uncertainty about what we claim to be natural, who we are, how we are related to each other, and how we should live. This book examines the how ideas about nature and ethics overlap and separate across cultural, species, geographic, and moral boundaries. It compares the varied ways in which nature and ideas of naturalness pervade all aspects of people’s lives, from family relationships, to the production and consumption of food, to ideas about scientific truth. In a world of increasing uncertainty, nature remains a powerful concept: the ultimate reference point, invested with profound moral authority to guide our ethical behaviour. This book was originally published as a special issue of Ethnos.
Author: Victoria Boydell Publisher: Emerald Group Publishing ISBN: 1800717350 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 439
Book Description
This book presents a dialogue between scholars on different aspects of reproductive technologies. If we continue to work in disciplinary silos, reproductive studies is in danger of missing, and thereby reproducing, the kinds of power structures that shape reproductive life.
Author: Lorraine Daston Publisher: MIT Press ISBN: 0262353814 Category : Philosophy Languages : en Pages : 88
Book Description
A pithy work of philosophical anthropology that explores why humans find moral orders in natural orders. Why have human beings, in many different cultures and epochs, looked to nature as a source of norms for human behavior? From ancient India and ancient Greece, medieval France and Enlightenment America, up to the latest controversies over gay marriage and cloning, natural orders have been enlisted to illustrate and buttress moral orders. Revolutionaries and reactionaries alike have appealed to nature to shore up their causes. No amount of philosophical argument or political critique deters the persistent and pervasive temptation to conflate the “is” of natural orders with the “ought” of moral orders. In this short, pithy work of philosophical anthropology, Lorraine Daston asks why we continually seek moral orders in natural orders, despite so much good counsel to the contrary. She outlines three specific forms of natural order in the Western philosophical tradition—specific natures, local natures, and universal natural laws—and describes how each of these three natural orders has been used to define and oppose a distinctive form of the unnatural. She argues that each of these forms of the unnatural triggers equally distinctive emotions: horror, terror, and wonder. Daston proposes that human reason practiced in human bodies should command the attention of philosophers, who have traditionally yearned for a transcendent reason, valid for all species, all epochs, even all planets.
Author: Peter Childs Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing ISBN: 1623564697 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 162
Book Description
A fresh set of concerns face the twenty-first century British novelist. In this study of the four key novelists Zadie Smith, Nadeem Aslam, Hari Kunzru and David Mitchell, the the changes in narrative approaches and critical directions of a new post-1989 fiction are explored. Close readings of the writers are informed by a range of contemporary theorists, critics and commentators to reveal the emphases of twenty-first century fiction. Terror, fear, consumerism, multinationalism, and corporatism: the terms circulating in culture and social networks are evident in Smith's faith in ethical living, Aslam's consideration of multiculturalism, the novels Kunzru builds around the politics of identity and in the importance Mitchell places on the interconnectedness of human life. By putting the emergence of a new British literary dynamic in the context of ethical as well as global contexts, this study analyzes the transformed fictional perceptions of a world no longer defined by the stand off of super powers.
Author: Lydia R. Cooper Publisher: Springer ISBN: 1137564776 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 210
Book Description
The Western genre provides the most widely recognized, iconic images of masculinity in the United States - gun-slinging, laconic white male heroes who emphasize individualism, violence, and an idiosyncratic form of justice. This idealized masculinity has been fused with ideas of national identity and character. Masculinities in Literature of the American West examines how contemporary literary Westerns push back against the coded image of the Western hero, exposing pervasive anxieties about what it means to "act like a man." Contemporary Westerns critique assumptions about innate connections between power, masculinity, and "American" character that influence public rhetoric even in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. These novels struggle with the monumental challenge of all Westerns: the challenge of being human in a place where "being a man" is so strictly coded, so unachievable, so complicit in atrocity, and so desirable that it is worth dying for, worth killing for, or perhaps worth nothing at all.
Author: Editor Publisher: Lulu.com ISBN: 1471783707 Category : Education Languages : en Pages : 124
Book Description
International Journal of Applied Linguistics and English Literature (IJALEL) is a peer-reviewed journal established in Australia. Authors are encouraged to submit complete unpublished and original works which are not under review in any other journal. The scopes of the journal include, but not limited to, the following topic areas: Applied Linguistics, Linguistics, and English Literature. The journal is published in both printed and online versions. The online version is free access and downloadable.Vol. 1 No. 1
Author: Joela Jacobs Publisher: MDPI ISBN: 3039283480 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 454
Book Description
Animal Narratology interrogates what it means to narrate, to speak—speak for, on behalf of—and to voice, or represent life beyond the human, which is in itself as different as insects, bears, and dogs are from each other, and yet more, as individual as a single mouse, horse, or puma. The varied contributions to this interdisciplinary Special Issue highlight assumptions about the human perception of, attitude toward, and responsibility for the animals that are read and written about, thus demonstrating that just as “the animal” does not exist, neither does “the human”. In their zoopoetic focus, the analyses are aware that animal narratology ultimately always contains an approximation of an animal perspective in human terms and terminology, yet they make clear that what matters is how the animal is approximated and that there is an effort to approach and encounter the non-human in the first place. Many of the analyses come to the conclusion that literary animals give readers the opportunity to expand their own points of view both on themselves and others by adopting another’s perspective to the degree that such an endeavor is possible. Ultimately, the contributions call for a recognition of the many spaces, moments, and modes in which human lives are entangled with those of animals—one of which is located within the creative bounds of storytelling.
Author: Marcus Power Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 1134614462 Category : Political Science Languages : en Pages : 369
Book Description
Geopolitics and Development examines the historical emergence of development as a form of governmentality, from the end of empire to the Cold War and the War on Terror. It illustrates the various ways in which the meanings and relations of development as a discourse, an apparatus and an aspiration, have been geopolitically imagined and enframed. The book traces some of the multiple historical associations between development and diplomacy and seeks to underline the centrality of questions of territory, security, statehood and sovereignty to the pursuit of development, along with its enrolment in various (b)ordering practices. In making a case for greater attention to the evolving nexus between geopolitics and development and with particular reference to Africa, the book explores the historical and contemporary geopolitics of foreign aid, the interconnections between development and counterinsurgency, the role of the state and social movements in (re)imagining development, the rise of (re)emerging donors like China, India and Brazil, and the growing significance of South–South flows of investment, trade and development cooperation. Drawing on post-colonial and postdevelopment approaches and on some of the author’s own original empirical research, this is an essential, critical and interdisciplinary analysis of the complex and dynamic political geographies of global development. Primarily intended for scholars and post-graduate students in development studies, human geography, African studies and international relations, this book provides an engaging, invaluable and up-to-date resource for making sense of the complex entanglement between geopolitics and development, past and present.
Author: María Puig de la Bellacasa Publisher: U of Minnesota Press ISBN: 1452953473 Category : Science Languages : en Pages : 336
Book Description
To care can feel good, or it can feel bad. It can do good, it can oppress. But what is care? A moral obligation? A burden? A joy? Is it only human? In Matters of Care, María Puig de la Bellacasa presents a powerful challenge to conventional notions of care, exploring its significance as an ethical and political obligation for thinking in the more than human worlds of technoscience and naturecultures. Matters of Care contests the view that care is something only humans do, and argues for extending to non-humans the consideration of agencies and communities that make the living web of care by considering how care circulates in the natural world. The first of the book’s two parts, “Knowledge Politics,” defines the motivations for expanding the ethico-political meanings of care, focusing on discussions in science and technology that engage with sociotechnical assemblages and objects as lively, politically charged “things.” The second part, “Speculative Ethics in Antiecological Times,” considers everyday ecologies of sustaining and perpetuating life for their potential to transform our entrenched relations to natural worlds as “resources.” From the ethics and politics of care to experiential research on care to feminist science and technology studies, Matters of Care is a singular contribution to an emerging interdisciplinary debate that expands agency beyond the human to ask how our understandings of care must shift if we broaden the world.
Author: Katharine Dow
Author: Victoria Boydell
Author: Nolwenn Bühler
Author: Lorraine Daston
Author: Peter Childs
Author: Lydia R. Cooper
Author: Editor
Author: Joela Jacobs
Author: Marcus Power
Author: María Puig de la Bellacasa