Learning Futures Facer, Keri
Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group,
2011, 20110329, 2011-03-28, 2011-03-29
eBook, Book
In the twenty-first century, educators around the world are being told that they need to transform education systems to adapt young people for the challenges of a global digital knowledge economy. ...Too rarely, however, do we ask whether this future vision is robust, achievable or even desirable, whether alternative futures might be in development, and what other possible futures might demand of education.
Drawing on ten years of research into educational innovation and socio-technical change, working with educators, researchers, digital industries, students and policy-makers, this book questions taken-for-granted assumptions about the future of education. Arguing that we have been working with too narrow a vision of the future, Keri Facer makes a case for recognizing the challenges that the next two decades may bring, including:
the emergence of new relationships between humans and technology
the opportunities and challenges of aging populations
the development of new forms of knowledge and democracy
the challenges of climate warming and environmental disruption
the potential for radical economic and social inequalities.
This book describes the potential for these developments to impact critical aspects of education - including adult-child relationships, social justice, curriculum design, community relationships and learning ecologies. Packed with examples from around the world and utilising vital research undertaken by the author while Research Director at the UK's Futurelab, the book helps to bring into focus the risks and opportunities for schools, students and societies over the coming two decades. It makes a powerful case for rethinking the relationship between education and social and technological change, and presents a set of key strategies for creating schools better able to meet the emerging needs of their students and communities.
An important contribution to the debates surrounding edu
World of Warcraft rapidly became one of the most popular online world games on the planet, amassing 11.5 million subscribers—officially making it an online community of gamers that had more ...inhabitants than the state of Ohio and was almost twice as populous as Scotland. It's a massively multiplayer online game, or MMO in gamer jargon, where each person controls a single character inside a virtual world, interacting with other people's characters and computer-controlled monsters, quest-givers, and merchants. In My Life as a Night Elf Priest, Bonnie Nardi, a well-known ethnographer who has published extensively on how theories of what we do intersect with how we adopt and use technology, compiles more than three years of participatory research in Warcraft play and culture in the United States and China into this field study of player behavior and activity. She introduces us to her research strategy and the history, structure, and culture of Warcraft; argues for applying activity theory and theories of aesthetic experience to the study of gaming and play; and educates us on issues of gender, culture, and addiction as part of the play experience. Nardi paints a compelling portrait of what drives online gamers both in this country and in China, where she spent a month studying players in Internet cafes. Bonnie Nardi has given us a fresh look not only at World of Warcraft but at the field of game studies as a whole. One of the first in-depth studies of a game that has become an icon of digital culture, My Life as a Night Elf Priest will capture the interest of both the gamer and the ethnographer.
Has the cell phone forever changed the way people communicate? The mobile phone is used for "real time" coordination while on the run, adolescents use it to manage their freedom, and teens "text" to ...each other day and night. The mobile phone is more than a simple technical innovation or social fad, more than just an intrusion on polite society. This book, based on world-wide research involving tens of thousands of interviews and contextual observations, looks into the impact of the phone on our daily lives. The mobile phone has fundamentally affected our accessibility, safety and security, coordination of social and business activities, and use of public places. Based on research conducted in dozens of countries, this insightful and entertaining book examines the once unexpected interaction between humans and cell phones, and between humans, period. The compelling discussion and projections about the future of the telephone should give designers everywhere a more informed practice and process, and provide researchers with new ideas to last years.*Rich Ling (an American working in Norway) is a prominent researcher, interviewed in the new technology article in the November 9 issue of the New York Times Magazine. *A particularly "good read", this book will be important to the designers, information designers, social psychologists, and others who will have an impact on the development of the new third generation of mobile telephones. *Carefully and wittily written by a senior research scientist at Telenor, Norway's largest telecommunications company, and developer of the first mobile telephone system that allowed for international roaming.
In this book Nina Glick Schiller and Ayse Çaglar, along with a stellar group of contributing authors, examine the relationship between migrants and cities in a time of massive urban restructuring. ...They find that locality matters in migration research and migrants matter in the reconfiguration of contemporary cities. This book provides a new approach to the study of migrant settlement and transnational connection in which cities rather than nation-states, ethnic groups, or transnational communities serve as the starting point for comparative analysis.
Neither negating nor privileging the nation-state,Locating Migrationprovides ethnographic insights into the various ways in which migrants and specific cities together mutually constitute and contest the local, national, and global. Cities are approached not as containers but as fluid and historically differentiated analytical entry points. Chapters explore migrants' relationship to the neoliberal rebranding, redevelopment, and rescaling of down-and-out, aspiring, and global cities in the United States and Europe. The various chapters document the pathways of incorporation and transnational connection of migrants from Asia, Africa, Latin America, and Europe.
Migrants are approached not as a homogenous category but in terms of their range of experiences of class, racialization, gender, history, politics, and religion. Setting aside the migrant/native divide that haunts most migration studies, the authors of this book view migrants as residents of cities and actors within them, understanding that to be a resident of a city is to live within, contribute to, and contest globe-spanning processes that shape urban economy, politics, and culture.
Roberto E. Barrios presents an ethnographic study of the aftermaths of four natural disasters: southern Honduras after Hurricane Mitch; New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina; Chiapas, Mexico, after ...the Grijalva River landslide; and southern Illinois following the Mississippi River flood. Focusing on the role of affect, Barrios examines the ways in which people who live through disasters use emotions as a means of assessing the relevance of governmentally sanctioned recovery plans, judging the effectiveness of such programs, and reflecting on the risk of living in areas that have been deemed prone to disaster. Emotions such as terror, disgust, or sentimental attachment to place all shape the meanings we assign to disasters as well as our political responses to them.The ethnographic cases inGoverning Affecthighlight how reconstruction programs, government agencies, and recovery experts often view postdisaster contexts as opportune moments to transform disaster-affected communities through principles and practices of modernist and neoliberal development.Governing Affectbrings policy and politics into dialogue with human emotion to provide researchers and practitioners with an analytical toolkit for apprehending and addressing issues of difference, voice, and inequity in the aftermath of catastrophes.
America is the most punitive nation in the world, incarcerating more than 2.3 million people - or one in 136 of its residents. Against the backdrop of this unprecedented mass imprisonment, punishment ...permeates everyday life, carrying with it complex cultural meanings. In The Culture of Punishment, Michelle Brown goes beyond prison gates and into the routine and popular engagements of everyday life, showing that those of us most distanced from the practice of punishment tend to be particularly harsh in our judgments.The Culture of Punishment takes readers on a tour of the sites where culture and punishment meet - television shows, movies, prison tourism, and post 9/11 new war prisons - demonstrating that because incarceration affects people along distinct race and class lines, it is only a privileged group of citizens who are removed from the experience of incarceration. These penal spectators, who often sanction the infliction of pain from a distance, risk overlooking the reasons for democratic oversight of the project of punishment and, more broadly, justifications for the prohibition of pain.
Climate change is widely agreed to be one the greatest challenges facing society today. Mitigating and adapting to it is certain to require new ways of living. Thus far efforts to promote less ...resource-intensive habits and routines have centred on typically limited understandings of individual agency, choice and change. This book shows how much more the social sciences have to offer.
The contributors to Sustainable Practices: Social Theory and Climate Change come from different disciplines - sociology, geography, economics and philosophy - but are alike in taking social theories of practice as a common point of reference. This volume explores questions which arise from this distinctive and fresh approach:
how do practices and material elements circulate and intersect?
how do complex infrastructures and systems form and break apart?
how does the reproduction of social practice sustain related patterns of inequality and injustice?
This collection shows how social theories of practice can help us understand what societal transitions towards sustainability might involve, and how they might be achieved. It will be of interest to students and researchers in sociology, environmental studies, geography, philosophy and economics, and to policy makers and advisors working in this field.
Reading Beyond the Book Fuller, Danielle; Sedo, DeNel Rehberg
2013, 20130402, 2013-04-02, Volume:
49
eBook
Literary culture has become a form of popular culture over the last fifteen years thanks to the success of televised book clubs, film adaptations, big-box book stores, online bookselling, and ...face-to-face and online book groups. This volume offers the first critical analysis of mass reading events and the contemporary meanings of reading in the UK, USA, and Canada based on original interviews and surveys with readers and event organizers.
The resurgence of book groups has inspired new cultural formations of what the authors call "shared reading." They interrogate the enduring attraction of an old technology for readers, community organizers, and government agencies, exploring the social practices inspired by the sharing of books in public spaces and revealing the complex ideological investments made by readers, cultural workers, institutions, and the mass media in the meanings of reading.
The modern nation-state of Turkey was established in 1923, but when and how did its citizens begin to identify themselves as Turks? Mustafa Kemal Atatrk, Turkeys founding president, is almost ...universally credited with creating a Turkish national identity through his revolutionary program to secularize the former heartland of the Ottoman Empire. Yet, despite Turkeys status as the lone secular state in the Muslim Middle East, religion remains a powerful force in Turkish society, and the country today is governed by a democratically elected political party with a distinctly religious (Islamist) orientation. In this history, Gavin D. Brockett takes a fresh look at the formation of Turkish national identity, focusing on the relationship between Islam and nationalism and the process through which a religious national identity emerged. Challenging the orthodoxy that Atatrk and the political elite imposed a sense of national identity from the top down, Brockett examines the social and political debates in provincial newspapers from around the country. He shows that the unprecedented expansion of print media in Turkey between 1945 and 1954, which followed the end of strict, single-party authoritarian government, created a forum in which ordinary people could inject popular religious identities into the new Turkish nationalism. Brockett makes a convincing case that it was this fruitful negotiation between secular nationalism and Islamrather than the imposition of secularism alonethat created the modern Turkish national identity.
States of Knowledge Jasanoff, Sheila
2004, 20040731, 2004-07-31, 20040101
eBook
Notes on contributors Acknowledgements 1. The Idiom of Co-production Sheila Jasanoff 2. Ordering Knowledge, Ordering Society Sheila Jasanoff 3. Climate Science and the Making of a Global Political ...Order Clark A. Miller 4. Co-producing CITES and the African Elephant Charis Thompson 5. Knowledge and Political Order in the European Environment Agency Claire Waterton and Brian Wynne 6. Plants, Power and Development: Founding the Imperial Department of Agriculture for the West Indies, 1880-1914 William K. Storey 7. Mapping Systems and Moral Order: Constituting property in genome laboratories Stephen Hilgartner 8. Patients and Scientists in French Muscular Dystrophy Research Vololona Rabeharisoa and Michel Callon 9. Circumscribing Expertise: Membership categories in courtroom testimony Michael Lynch 10. The Science of Merit and the Merit of Science: Mental order and social order in early twentieth-century France and America John Carson 11. Mysteries of State, Mysteries of Nature: Authority, knowledge and expertise in the seventeenth century Peter Dear 12. Reconstructing Sociotechnical Order: Vannevar Bush and US science policy Michael Aaron Dennis 13. Science and the Political Imagination in Contemporary Democracies Yaron Ezrah 14. Afterword Sheila Jasanoff References Index