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Wicked problems : how to engineer a better world
Our world is filled with pernicious problems. How, for example, did novice pilots learn to fly without taking to the air and risking their lives? How should cities process our waste without polluting the environment? Challenges that tangle personal, public, and planetary aspects - often occurring in health, infrastructure, business, and policy - are known as wicked problems. In 'Wicked Problems,' engineer Guru Madhavan examines historic tragedies and lesser-known tales, from the efficient design of battleships to a volcano eruption that curtailed global commerce. Braided throughout is the uplifting tale of Edwin Link, who revolutionized aviation with his flight trainer. In Link's story, Madhavan uncovers a model mindset to engage with wickedness. An homage to society's innovators and maintainers, 'Wicked Problems' offers a refreshing vision for readers of all backgrounds to build a better future.
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Renovating Russia
Renovating Russiais a richly comparative investigation of late Imperial and early Soviet medico-scientific theories of moral and social disorder. Daniel Beer argues that in the late Imperial years liberal psychiatrists, psychologists, and criminologists grappled with an intractable dilemma. They sought to renovate Russia, to forge a modern enlightened society governed by the rule of law, but they feared the backwardness, irrationality, and violent potential of the Russian masses. Situating their studies of degeneration, crime, mental illness, and crowd psychology in a pan-European context, Beer shows how liberals' fears of societal catastrophe were only heightened by the effects of industrial modernization and the rise of mass politics.
In the wake of the orgy of violence that swept the Empire in the 1905 Revolution, these intellectual elites increasingly put their faith in coercive programs of scientific social engineering. Their theories survived liberalism's political defeat in 1917 and meshed with the Bolsheviks' radical project for social transformation. They came to sanction the application of violent transformative measures against entire classes, culminating in the waves of state repression that accompanied forced industrialization and collectivization.Renovating Russiathus offers a powerful revisionist challenge to established views of the fate of liberalism in the Russian Revolution.
eBook
The Ethnography of Rhythm: Orality and Its Technologies
Who speaks? The author as producer, the contingency of the text, intertextuality, the \"device\"-core ideas of modern literary theory-were all pioneered in the shadow of oral literature. Authorless, loosely dated, and variable, oral texts have always posed a challenge to critical interpretation. When it began to be thought that culturally significant texts-starting with Homer and the Bible-had emerged from an oral tradition, assumptions on how to read these texts were greatly perturbed. Through readings that range from ancient Greece, Rome, and China to the Cold War imaginary, The Ethnography of Rhythm situates the study of oral traditions in the contentious space of nineteenth- and twentieth-century thinking about language, mind, and culture. It also demonstrates the role of technologies in framing this category of poetic creation. By making possible a new understanding of Maussian \"techniques of the body\" as belonging to the domain of Derridean \"arche-writing,\" Haun Saussy shows how oral tradition is a means of inscription in its own right, rather than an antecedent made obsolete by the written word or other media and data-storage devices.
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The unconstructable earth
Neyrat is a major younger voice in French philosophy and environmental humanities, who has recently moved form Paris to the States, where he is quickly developing a following.
Winner, French Voices Award for excellence in publication and translation.
The Anthropocene announces a post-natural planet that can be remade at will through the process of geoengineering. With it, a new kind of power, geopower, takes the entire Earth, in its social, biological, and geophysical dimensions, as an object of knowledge, intervention, and governmentality. This shift has been aided, wittingly or not, by theorists of the constructivist turn who have likewise called into question the divide between nature and culture and have thus found themselves helpless against the project to replace Earth with Earth 2.0.
Against both camps, this book confronts the unconstructable Earth, proposing an \"ecology of separation\" that acknowledges the wild, subtractive capacity of nature. Against technocratic delusion, but equally against a racially tinged organicism, Neyrat shows what it means to appreciate Earth as an unsubstitutable becoming that cannot be replicated in a laboratory and that always escapes the hubris of those who would remake and master it.
A critical analysis of the discourses of geoconstructivism, whereby we are said to be able to remedy ecological problems by simple technical means.Neyrat argues against both a neoliberal technocracy (in which the earth is an object to be remade) and a new-agey organicism marked by unacknowledged racism and sexism.
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Engineers for Change
An account of conflicts within engineering in the 1960s that helped shape our dominant contemporary understanding of technological change as the driver of history.
In the late 1960s an eclectic group of engineers joined the antiwar and civil rights activists of the time in agitating for change. The engineers were fighting to remake their profession, challenging their fellow engineers to embrace a more humane vision of technology. In Engineers for Change, Matthew Wisnioski offers an account of this conflict within engineering, linking it to deep-seated assumptions about technology and American life.
The postwar period in America saw a near-utopian belief in technology's beneficence. Beginning in the mid-1960s, however, society—influenced by the antitechnology writings of such thinkers as Jacques Ellul and Lewis Mumford—began to view technology in a more negative light. Engineers themselves were seen as conformist organization men propping up the military-industrial complex. A dissident minority of engineers offered critiques of their profession that appropriated concepts from technology's critics. These dissidents were criticized in turn by conservatives who regarded them as countercultural Luddites. And yet, as Wisnioski shows, the radical minority spurred the professional elite to promote a new understanding of technology as a rapidly accelerating force that our institutions are ill-equipped to handle. The negative consequences of technology spring from its very nature—and not from engineering's failures. “Sociotechnologists” were recruited to help society adjust to its technology. Wisnioski argues that in responding to the challenges posed by critics within their profession, engineers in the 1960s helped shape our dominant contemporary understanding of technological change as the driver of history.
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Everyday engineering : an ethnography of design and innovation
This work consists of ethnographic studies. The sites and types of engineering explored include mechanical design in manufacturing industries, environmental management within companies and the implementation of a system for separating household waste.
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Engineering and Social Justice
An increasing number of researchers and educators in the field of engineering wish to integrate considerations of social justice into their work and practice. In this volume, an international team of authors, from a range of disciplinary backgrounds, invite scholars to think and teach in new ways that acknowledge the social, as well as technical, impact engineering can have on our world and that open possibilities for social justice movements to help shape engineering/technology. The book examines three areas of an engineering academic’s professional role: teaching, research, and community engagement. Some of the authors have created classes to help students think through their roles as engineering practitioners in a changing society, and present case studies here. They also explore questions of access to engineering education. Others contributors are focusing their research on improving the lives of the marginalized and powerless. Yet others are engaging local groups and exploring ways in which universities might serve their communities and in which academic institutions can themselves be more socially just. The contributors take a broad social and ecological justice perspective to critique existing practices and explore alternatives. The result is a handbook for all scholars of engineering who think beyond the technical elements of their field, and an essential reader for anyone who believes in the transformative power of the discipline.
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