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Making Virtual Worlds
The past decade has seen phenomenal growth in the development and use of virtual worlds. In one of the most notable, Second Life, millions of people have created online avatars in order to play games, take classes, socialize, and conduct business transactions. Second Life offers a gathering point and the tools for people to create a new world online.
Too often neglected in popular and scholarly accounts of such groundbreaking new environments is the simple truth that, of necessity, such virtual worlds emerge from physical workplaces marked by negotiation, creation, and constant change. Thomas Malaby spent a year at Linden Lab, the real-world home of Second Life, observing those who develop and profit from the sprawling, self-generating system they have created.
Some of the challenges created by Second Life for its developers were of a very traditional nature, such as how to cope with a business that is growing more quickly than existing staff can handle. Others are seemingly new: How, for instance, does one regulate something that is supposed to run on its own? Is it possible simply to create a space for people to use and then not govern its use? Can one apply these same free-range/free-market principles to the office environment in which the game is produced? \"Lindens\"-as the Linden Lab employees call themselves-found that their efforts to prompt user behavior of one sort or another were fraught with complexities, as a number of ongoing processes collided with their own interventions.
InMaking Virtual Worlds, Malaby thoughtfully describes the world of Linden Lab and the challenges faced while he was conducting his in-depth ethnographic research there. He shows how the workers of a very young but quickly growing company were themselves caught up in ideas about technology, games, and organizations, and struggled to manage not only their virtual world but also themselves in a nonhierarchical fashion. In exploring the practices the Lindens employed, he questions what was at stake in their virtual world, what a game really is (and how people participate), and the role of the unexpected in a product like Second Life and an organization like Linden Lab.
eBook
Black Women against the Land Grab
In Brazil and throughout the African diaspora, black women, especially poor black women, are rarely considered leaders of social movements let alone political theorists. But in the northeastern city of Salvador, Brazil, it is these very women who determine how urban policies are established. Focusing on the Gamboa de Baixo neighborhood in Salvador's city center,Black Women against the Land Grabexplores how black women's views on development have radicalized local communities to demand justice and social change.
InBlack Women against the Land Grab, Keisha-Khan Y. Perry describes the key role of local women activists in the citywide movement for land and housing rights. She reveals the importance of geographic location for understanding the gendered aspects of urban renewal and the formation of black women-led social movements. How have black women shaped the politics of urban redevelopment, Perry asks, and what does this kind of political intervention tell us about black women's agency? Her work uncovers the ways in which political labor at the neighborhood level is central to the mass mobilization of black people against institutional racism and for citizenship rights and resources in Brazil.
Highlighting the political life of black communities, specifically those in urban contexts often represented as socially pathological and politically bankrupt,Black Women against the Land Graboffers a valuable corrective to how we think about politics and about black women, particularly poor black women, as a political force.
eBook
Students' Civic Online Reasoning: A National Portrait
Are today's students able to discern quality information from sham online? In the largest investigation of its kind, we administered an assessment to 3,446 high school students. Equipped with a live internet connection, the students responded to six constructed-response tasks. The students struggled on all of them. Asked to investigate a site claiming to \"disseminate factual reports\" on climate science, 96% never learned about the organization's ties to the fossil fuel industry. Two thirds were unable to distinguish news stories from ads on a popular website's home page. More than half believed that an anonymously posted Facebook video, shot in Russia, provided \"strong evidence\" of U.S. voter fraud. Instead of investigating the organization or group behind a site, students were often duped by weak signs of credibility: a website's \"look,\" its top-level domain, the content on its About page, and the sheer quantity of information it provided. The study's sample reflected the demographic profile of high school students in the United States, and a multilevel regression model explored whether scores varied by student characteristics. Findings revealed differences in student abilities by grade level, self-reported grades, locality, socioeconomic status, race, maternal education, and free/reduced-price lunch status. Taken together, these findings reveal an urgent need to prepare students to thrive in a world in which information flows ceaselessly across their screens.
Journal Article
Upheaval : turning points for nations in crisis
\"In his international bestsellers Guns, Germs and Steel and Collapse, Jared Diamond transformed our understanding of what makes civilizations rise and fall. Now, in his third book in this... trilogy, he reveals how successful nations recover from crises while adopting selective changes -- a coping mechanism more commonly associated with individuals recovering from personal crises. Diamond compares how six countries have survived recent upheavals -- ranging from the forced opening of Japan by U.S. Commodore Perry's fleet, to the Soviet Union's attack on Finland, to a murderous coup or countercoup in Chile and Indonesia, to the transformations of Germany and Austria after World War Two. Because Diamond has lived and spoken the language in five of these six countries, he can present gut-wrenching histories experienced firsthand. These nations coped, to varying degrees, through mechanisms such as acknowledgment of responsibility, painfully honest self-appraisal, and learning from models of other nations. Looking to the future, Diamond examines whether the United States, Japan, and the whole world are successfully coping with the grave crises they currently face. Can we learn from lessons of the past? Adding a psychological dimension to the in-depth history, geography, biology, and anthropology that mark all of Diamond's books, Upheaval reveals factors influencing how both whole nations and individual people can respond to big challenges. The result is a book epic in scope, but also his most personal book yet\" -- Provided by publishers.
Book
Born out of place
Hong Kong is a meeting place for migrant domestic workers, traders, refugees, asylum seekers, tourists, businessmen, and local residents. In Born Out of Place, Nicole Constable looks at the experiences of Indonesian and Filipina women in this Asian world city. Giving voice to the stories of these migrant mothers, their South Asian, African, Chinese, and Western expatriate partners, and their Hong Kong–born babies, Constable raises a serious question: Do we regard migrants as people, or just as temporary workers? This accessible ethnography provides insight into global problems of mobility, family, and citizenship and points to the consequences, creative responses, melodramas, and tragedies of labor and migration policies.
eBook
Men, masculinity, music and emotions
\"This book examines how we can reconcile the widely held belief that men are 'less emotional' than women, with a history of emotions in music. A belief that men identify with an ideal of rationality - understood as the separation of emotion from rational action - has informed critical studies on men and masculinities. Yet engaging with a wide range of music to stimulate, reflect and express, as well as manage particular types of emotions continues to be the key to music's appeal. Through detailing how judgments about emotions are expressed in relation to music tastes and distastes, this book demonstrates that emotions are as much social, value judgments as embodied, affective responses. It therefore raises the importance of looking at music listening contexts, culture, personal experience and a history of emotions in order to contest the orthodoxy that men's privilege stems from the 'repression' of emotions\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
Crip Theory
A bold and contemporary discourse of the intersection
of disability studies and queer studies
Crip Theory attends to the contemporary cultures of
disability and queerness that are coming out all over. Both
disability studies and queer theory are centrally concerned
with how bodies, pleasures, and identities are represented as
“normal” or as abject, but
Crip Theory is the first book to analyze thoroughly
the ways in which these interdisciplinary fields inform each
other. Drawing on feminist theory, African American and
Latino/a cultural theories, composition studies, film and
television studies, and theories of globalization and
counter-globalization, Robert McRuer articulates the central
concerns of crip theory and considers how such a critical
perspective might impact cultural and historical inquiry in the
humanities.
Crip Theory puts forward readings of the Sharon
Kowalski story, the performance art of Bob Flanagan, and the
journals of Gary Fisher, as well as critiques of the
domesticated queerness and disability marketed by the
Millennium March, or Bravo TV’s
Queer Eye for the Straight Guy . McRuer examines how
dominant and marginal bodily and sexual identities are
composed, and considers the vibrant ways that disability and
queerness unsettle and re-write those identities in order to
insist that another world is possible.
eBook