For too long, the approach to seemingly universal experiences like love, death, and even time in film has been dominated by the Global North. But what if such explorations developed horizontally instead? Drawing from both European and African cultural theorists, including Gilles Deleuze and Wole Soyinka, Vlad Dima invites us to consider what happens to postcolonial African film if we no longer privilege the idea of time. How else might we understand the cinematic image, and how would its meanings change? Meaninglessness: Time, Rhythm, and the Undead in Postcolonial Cinema is a study of meaning and meaninglessness through the figure of the undead, beginning with francophone Africa and extending to postcolonial France. Through the analysis of films like Mati Diop’s Atlantics and Jean-Pierre Bekolo’s Miraculous Weapons, Dima shows how the African cinematic image may produce meaning without any attachment to European time, and how that meaning is connected instead to the philosophy of negritude and to the notion of rhythm. Meaninglessness introduces the concept of the rhythm-sequence as a new way to understand the African moving image.

Meanings of Antiquity is the first dedicated study of how the oldest Japanese myths, recorded in the eighth-century texts Kojiki and Nihon shoki, changed in meaning and significance between 800 and 1800 CE. Generations of Japanese scholars and students have turned to these two texts and their creation myths to understand what it means to be Japanese and where Japan fits into the world order.

As the shape and scale of the world explained by these myths changed, these myths evolved in turn. Over the course of the millennium covered in this study, Japan transforms from the center of a proud empire to a millet seed at the edge of the Buddhist world, from the last vestige of China’s glorious Zhou Dynasty to an archipelago on a spherical globe. Analyzing historical records, poetry, fiction, religious writings, military epics, political treatises, and textual commentary, Matthieu Felt identifies the geographical, cosmological, epistemological, and semiotic changes that led to new adaptations of Japanese myths. Felt demonstrates that the meanings of Japanese antiquity and of Japan’s most ancient texts were—and are—a work in progress, a collective effort of writers and thinkers over the past 1,300 years.

Over the past twenty years, elite colleges and universities enacted policies that reshaped the racial and class composition of their campuses, and over the past decade, Latinos’ college attendance notably increased. While discussions on educational mobility often focus on its perceived benefits – that it will ultimately lead to social and economic mobility – less attention is paid to the process of “making it” and the challenges low-income youth experience when navigating these elite spaces. In Meanings of Mobility, sociologist Leah C. Schmalzbauer explores the experiences of low-income Latino youth attending highly selective, elite colleges.
 
To better understand these experiences, Schmalzbauer draws on interviews with 60 low-income Latino youth who graduated or were set to graduate from Amherst College, one of the most selective private colleges in the United States. The vast majority of these students were the first in their immigrant families to go to college in the U.S. She finds that while most of the students believed attending Amherst provided them with previously unimaginable opportunities, adjusting to life on campus came with significant challenges. Many of the students Schmalzbauer spoke with had difficulties adapting to the cultural norms at Amherst as well as with relating to their non-Latino, non-low-income peers. The challenges these students faced were not limited to life on campus. As they attempted to adapt to Amherst, many felt distanced from the family and friends they left behind who could not understand the new challenges they faced.
 
The students credit their elite education for access to extraordinary educational and employment opportunities. However, their experiences while in college and afterward reveal that the relationship between educational and social mobility is much more complicated and less secure than popular conversations about the “American Dream” suggest. Many students found that their educational attainment was not enough to erase the core challenges of growing up in a marginalized immigrant family: many were still poor, faced racism, and those who were undocumented or had undocumented family members still feared deportation.
 
Schmalzbeauer suggests ways elite colleges can better support low-income Latino students and lower the emotional price of educational mobility, including the creation of immigration offices on campus to provide programming and support for undocumented students and their families. She recommends educating staff to better understand the centrality of family for these students and the challenges they face, as well as educating more privileged students about inequality and the life experiences of their marginalized peers.
 
Meanings of Mobility provides compelling insights into the difficulties faced by low-income Latinos pursuing educational and social mobility in America’s elite institutions.
 

Westerners think of time as a measure of duration, a metric quantity that is continuous, homogeneous, unchangeable, and never ending—a reality that lies outside of human existence. How did the people of Mesoamerica and the Andes, isolated as they were from the rest of the world, conceive of their histories? How and why did they time their rituals? What knowledge can we acquire about their time from studying the material record they have left behind?

This volume brings together specialists in anthropology, archaeology, art history, astronomy, and the history of science to contemplate concrete and abstract temporal concepts gleaned from the Central Mexicans, Mayans, and Andeans. Contributors first address how people reckon and register time; they compare the western linear, progressive way of knowing time with the largely cyclic notions of temporality derived from the Americas, and they dissect, explain, and explore the origins of the complex dynastic and ritual calendars of the Maya, Inca, and Aztecs. They subsequently consider how people sense time and its moral dimensions. Time becomes an inescapable feature of the process of perception, an entity that occupies a succession of moments rather than the knife-edge present ingrained in our Western minds.

An accessible new translation of one of Shakespeare’s most interesting and challenging plays.
 
One of Shakespeare’s most difficult plays, Measure for Measure has long challenged performers and audiences alike. In reworking the play in her translation, Aditi Brennan Kapil honors the structure, rhythms, and themes of Shakespeare’s original. Kapil’s updated language makes this cautionary fable about frailty, power, and the perils of legislating morality accessible for today’s audiences.
 
This translation of Measure for Measure was written as part of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival’s Play On! project, which commissioned new translations of thirty-nine Shakespeare plays. These translations present the work of “The Bard” in language accessible to modern audiences while never losing the beauty of Shakespeare’s verse. Enlisting the talents of a diverse group of contemporary playwrights, screenwriters, and dramaturges from diverse backgrounds, this project reenvisions Shakespeare for the twenty-first century. These volumes make these works available for the first time in print—a new First Folio for a new era.

They went to Cairo, leaving behind the adobe houses built along the edge of the Nile and the villagers who all knew each other and who had lived on this land for more centuries than their names could count. Behind them, they left the imprint of their footsteps for others who might follow.
 
This family saga begins when Salim, the eldest of three brothers, moves to Cairo at the start of the twentieth century with dreams of opening his own bakery. His decision to leave his ancestral village of Kom Ombo despite his parents’ objections reverberates across generations, kicking off a series of migrations that shape the lives of his family and their descendants throughout the decades that follow. These migrations only intensify after the revolution of 1952—with Misha, Salim’s eldest grandchild, being the first to flee to “Amreeka,” his annual phone calls home becoming briefer and briefer with each passing year.
 
Culminating with the 2011 protests in Tahrir Square, Pauline Kaldas’s The Measure of Distance is a detailed portrait of immigration against the backdrop of an Egypt in constant flux and an America that is always falling short of the fantasy. Alternating between tales of those who migrate and those who stay, this expansive novel follows its characters as they determine the course of their lives, often choosing one uncertainty over another as they migrate to new lands or plant their roots more firmly in their homeland.
 

Innovative new approaches for improving GDP measurement to better gauge economic productivity.

Official measures of gross domestic product (GDP) indicate that productivity growth has declined in the United States over the last two decades. This has led to calls for policy changes from pro-business tax reform to stronger antitrust measures. But are our twentieth-century economic methods actually measuring our twenty-first-century productivity?

The Measure of Economies offers a synthesis of the state of knowledge in productivity measurement at a time when many question the accuracy and scope of GDP. With chapters authored by leading economic experts on topics such as the digital economy, health care, and the environment, it highlights the inadequacies of current practices and discusses cutting-edge alternatives.

Pragmatic and forward-facing, The Measure of Economies is an essential resource not only for social scientists, but also for policymakers and business leaders seeking to understand the complexities of economic growth in a time of rapidly evolving technology.

A Measure of Malpractice tells the story and presents the results of the Harvard Medical Practice Study, the largest and most comprehensive investigation ever undertaken of the performance of the medical malpractice system. The Harvard study was commissioned by the government of New York in 1986, in the midst of a malpractice crisis that had driven insurance premiums for surgeons and obstetricians in New York City to nearly $200,000 a year.

The Harvard-based team of doctors, lawyers, economists, and statisticians set out to investigate what was actually happening to patients in hospitals and to doctors in courtrooms, launching a far more informed debate about the future of medical liability in the 1990s. Careful analysis of the medical records of 30,000 patients hospitalized in 1984 showed that approximately one in twenty-five patients suffered a disabling medical injury, one quarter of these as a result of the negligence of a doctor or other provider. After assembling all the malpractice claims filed in New York State since 1975, the authors found that just one in eight patients who had been victims of negligence actually filed a malpractice claim, and more than two-thirds of these claims were filed by the wrong patients.

The study team then interviewed injured patients in the sample to discover the actual financial loss they had experienced: the key finding was that for roughly the same dollar amount now being spent on a tort system that compensates only a handful of victims, it would be possible to fund comprehensive disability insurance for all patients significantly disabled by a medical accident. The authors, who came to the project from very different perspectives about the present malpractice system, are now in agreement about the value of a new model of medical liability. Rather than merely tinker with the current system which fixes primary legal responsibility on individual doctors who can be proved medically negligent, legislatures should encourage health care organizations to take responsibility for the financial losses of all patients injured in their care.

Measured Language: Quantitative Studies of Acquisition, Assessment, and Variation focuses on ways in which various aspects of language can be quantified and how measurement informs and advances our understanding of language. The metaphors and operationalizations of quantification serve as an important lingua franca for seemingly disparate areas of linguistic research, allowing methods and constructs to be translated from one area of linguistic investigation to another.

Measured Language includes forms of measurement and quantitative analysis current in diverse areas of linguistic research from language assessment to language change, from generative linguistics to experimental psycholinguistics, and from longitudinal studies to classroom research. Contributors demonstrate how to operationalize a construct, develop a reliable way to measure it, and finally validate that measurement—and share the relevance of their perspectives and findings to other areas of linguistic inquiry. The range and clarity of the research collected here ensures that even linguists who would not traditionally use quantitative methods will find this volume useful.

For seven years, Paul Lockhart’s A Mathematician’s Lament enjoyed a samizdat-style popularity in the mathematics underground, before demand prompted its 2009 publication to even wider applause and debate. An impassioned critique of K–12 mathematics education, it outlined how we shortchange students by introducing them to math the wrong way. Here Lockhart offers the positive side of the math education story by showing us how math should be done. Measurement offers a permanent solution to math phobia by introducing us to mathematics as an artful way of thinking and living.

In conversational prose that conveys his passion for the subject, Lockhart makes mathematics accessible without oversimplifying. He makes no more attempt to hide the challenge of mathematics than he does to shield us from its beautiful intensity. Favoring plain English and pictures over jargon and formulas, he succeeds in making complex ideas about the mathematics of shape and motion intuitive and graspable. His elegant discussion of mathematical reasoning and themes in classical geometry offers proof of his conviction that mathematics illuminates art as much as science.

Lockhart leads us into a universe where beautiful designs and patterns float through our minds and do surprising, miraculous things. As we turn our thoughts to symmetry, circles, cylinders, and cones, we begin to see that almost anyone can “do the math” in a way that brings emotional and aesthetic rewards. Measurement is an invitation to summon curiosity, courage, and creativity in order to experience firsthand the playful excitement of mathematical work.

One of the most interesting questions that can be raised about the twentieth century world concerns the degree to which industrialization created a common culture for all peoples. Reported here are the results of an empirical investigation designed to produce instruments to measure those personal values that have been central variables in the theory of modernization of societies.

The purpose of Joseph Kahl’s research is primarily methodological: to advance the description and measurement of those value orientations used by men to organize their occupational careers. It seeks to delineate and measure a set of values that represents a “modern” view of work and life.

The working laboratory was Brazil and Mexico, two countries undergoing rapid industrialization. More than six hundred men in Brazil and more than seven hundred in Mexico responded to questionnaires. In addition, over twenty-five men in each country were asked to sit beside a tape recorder and talk freely of their worldviews. The respondents were divided between inhabitants of the cities of Rio de Janeiro and Mexico City and those who lived in provincial towns of fewer than ten thousand inhabitants. The samples included manual and nonmanual employees.

The results showed that the main variable predicting whether or not a man would tend toward modernism was his social-class position. Middle-class men were much more modern in outlook than working-class men. Residence in a metropolis rather than in a small town also increased modernism, though to a lesser extent. Differences between Brazil and Mexico (and, indeed, the United States) were found to be surprisingly small, of considerably less weight than position in the social structure in predicting value orientations.

The author addresses himself primarily to sociologists and their students who are themselves studying aspects of socio-economic development. His findings, however, cannot fail to be of interest and benefit to social scientists of various disciplines and to all who are concerned with the process of development—planners at the national and local levels, demographers, and businesspeople.

This Festschrift in honor of William White Howells demonstrates the vitality and methodological diversity that existed in the field of biological anthropology in the 1970s.

Measuring innovation is a challenging task, both for researchers and for national statisticians, and it is increasingly important in light of the ongoing digital revolution. National accounts and many other economic statistics were designed before the emergence of the digital economy and the growth in importance of intangible capital. They do not yet fully capture the wide range of innovative activity that is observed in modern economies. This volume examines how to measure innovation, track its effects on economic activity and on prices, and understand how it has changed the structure of production processes, labor markets, and organizational form and operation in business. The contributors explore new approaches to and data sources for measurement, such as collecting data for a particular innovation as opposed to a firm and using trademarks for tracking innovation. They also consider the connections between university-based R&D and business start-ups and the potential impacts of innovation on income distribution. The research suggests strategies for expanding current measurement frameworks to better capture innovative activity, including developing more detailed tracking of global value chains to identify innovation across time and space and expanding the measurement of innovation’s impacts on GDP in fields such as consumer content delivery and cloud computing. 

The U.S. government is the world’s largest financial institution, providing credit and assuming risk through diverse activities. But the potential cost and risk of these actions and obligations remain poorly understood and only partially measured. Government budgetary and financial accounting rules, which largely determine the information available to federal decision makers, have only just begun to address these issues. However, recently there has been a push to rethink how these programs are valued and accounted for, and some progress has been made in applying modern valuation methods—such as options pricing, risk-adjusted discount rates, and value at risk—to these types of obligations.

This book contains new research, both empirical and methodological, on the measurement and management of these costs and risks. The analyses encompass a broad spectrum of federal programs, including housing, catastrophe insurance, student loans, social security, and environmental liabilities. Collectively, the contributions gathered in Measuring and Managing Federal Financial Risk demonstrate that the logic of financial economics can be a useful tool for studying a range of federal activities.

Analysts attempting to assess economic growth in revolutionary Cuba are faced with two formidable obstacles: (1) official macroeconomic indicators published by the government are scarce and sometimes inconsistent because of frequent changes in the method of calculation; and (2) these indicators are not compatible with those produced by market economies because of differences in national income concepts. Because of these obstacles, it is difficult to analyze the performance of Cuba’s economy over time and to compare its economic performance directly with that of other nations.

Using a variant of the method developed by Abram Bergson to estimate the growth rates of the Soviet Union and subsequently applied to centrally planned economies in Eastern Europe, Jorge Perez-López has estimated the growth rate of the Cuban economy in real terms for the 1965–1982 period. His estimated indexes suggest that the Cuban economy expanded at a considerably slower pace than would be implied by official data.

By constructing yardsticks of economic performance for revolutionary Cuba that are compatible with those used by Western nations, Perez-López provides for the first time a basis for analyzing the real growth of the Cuban economy during the revolutionary period.

A collection of twenty-three studies that explore the latest developments in the analysis of income and wealth distribution and mobility.

Economic research is increasingly focused on inequality in the distribution of personal resources and outcomes. One aspect of inequality is mobility: are individuals locked into their respective places in this distribution? To what extent do circumstances change, either over the lifecycle or across generations? Research not only measures inequality and mobility, but also analyzes the historical, economic, and social determinants of these outcomes and the effect of public policies. This volume explores the latest developments in the analysis of income and wealth distribution and mobility. The collection of twenty-three studies is divided into five sections. The first examines observed patterns of income inequality and shifts in the distribution of earnings and in other factors that contribute to it. The next examines wealth inequality, including a substantial discussion of the difficulties of defining and measuring wealth. The third section presents new evidence on the intergenerational transmission of inequality and the mechanisms that underlie it. The next section considers the impact of various policy interventions that are directed at reducing inequality. The final section addresses the challenges of combining household-level data, potentially from multiple sources such as surveys and administrative records, and aggregate data to study inequality, and explores ways to make survey data more comparable with national income accounts data.  

Pressures of population growth, rapid urbanization, industrialization, and stress on natural resources provide new challenges to the Asian Development Bank as it strives to set forth environmental issues as an important element of sustainable economic development in the Asian and Pacific region. While the Bank can provide policy and technical guidance, the governments themselves must take the lead in providing the resources and policies needed to address effectively the rapidly changing environmental condition. How we measure the effectiveness of governmental performance in meeting the environmental challenge in Asia and the Pacific is the subject of this book.

By drawing on experiences in six Asian and Pacific countries, the authors have developed a series of methodological tools to assist others in assessing the environmental quality of air, water, soil, and biological diversity in developing countries. These tools can then be used to determine the financial resources needed to achieve the quality of life characteristic of a sustainable development path.

As part of a larger study on the future of the post–World War II liberal international order, RAND researchers analyze the health of the existing order and offer implications for future U.S. policy. The study’s overall conclusion is that the postwar order continues to enjoy many elements of stability but is increasingly threatened by major geopolitical and domestic socioeconomic trends that call into question the order’s fundamental assumptions.

Measuring the Performance of the Hollow State is the first in-depth look at the influence of performance measurement on the effectiveness of the federal government. To do this, the authors examine the influence of the Government Performance and Results Act of 1993 (with consideration of the later Program Assessment Rating Tool of 2002) on federal performance measurement, agency performance, and program outcomes. They focus a systematic examination on five agencies in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services—the Food and Drug Administration, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the Health Resources and Services Administration, the National Institutes of Health, and the Indian Health Service. Besides representing a wide range of federal government organizational structures and program formats, these agencies offer a diverse array of third-party arrangements including states, native American tribes, scientists, medical schools, and commercial and nonprofit health care intermediaries and carriers.

Exploring the development of performance measures in light of widely varying program mandates, the authors look at issues that affect the quality of this measurement and particularly the influence of program performance by third parties. They consider factors such as goal conflict and ambiguity, politics, and the critical role of intergovernmental relations in federal program performance and performance measurement. Through their findings, they offer illumination to two major questions in public management today—what are the uses and limitations of performance measurement as a policy and management tool and how does performance measurement work when applied to the management of third-party government?

While scholars and students in public administration and governmental reform will find this book of particular interest, it will also be of use to anyone working in the public sector who would like to have a better understanding of performance measurement.

To inform improvements to the quality of care delivered by the military health system for posttraumatic stress disorder and major depressive disorder, researchers developed a framework and identified, developed, and described a candidate set of measures for monitoring, assessing, and improving the quality of care. This document describes their research approach and the measure sets that they identified.

How do you judge the quality of a school, a district, a teacher, a student? By the test scores, of course. Yet for all the talk, what educational tests can and can’t tell you, and how scores can be misunderstood and misused, remains a mystery to most. The complexities of testing are routinely ignored, either because they are unrecognized, or because they may be—well, complicated.

Inspired by a popular Harvard course for students without an extensive mathematics background, Measuring Up demystifies educational testing—from MCAS to SAT to WAIS, with all the alphabet soup in between. Bringing statistical terms down to earth, Daniel Koretz takes readers through the most fundamental issues that arise in educational testing and shows how they apply to some of the most controversial issues in education today, from high-stakes testing to special education. He walks readers through everyday examples to show what tests do well, what their limits are, how easily tests and scores can be oversold or misunderstood, and how they can be used sensibly to help discover how much kids have learned.

What is meat? Is it simply food to consume, or a metaphor for our own bodies? Can “bloody” vegan burgers, petri dish beef, live animals, or human milk be categorized as meat? In pursuing these questions, the contributors to Meat! trace the shifting boundaries of the meanings of meat across time, geography, and cultures. In studies of chicken, fish, milk, barbecue, fake meat, animal sacrifice, cannibalism, exotic meat, frozen meat, and other manifestations of meat, they highlight meat's entanglements with race, gender, sexuality, and disability. From the imperial politics embedded in labeling canned white tuna as “the chicken of the sea” to the relationship between beef bans, yoga, and bodily purity in Hindu nationalist politics, the contributors demonstrate how meat is an ideal vantage point from which to better understand transnational circuits of power and ideology as well as the histories of colonialism, ableism, and sexism.

Contributors. Neel Ahuja, Irina Aristarkhova, Sushmita Chatterjee, Mel Y. Chen, Kim Q. Hall, Jennifer A. Hamilton, Anita Mannur, Elspeth Probyn, Parama Roy, Banu Subramaniam, Angela Willey, Psyche Williams-Forson

With cities across the country adding miles of bike lanes and building bike-share stations, bicycling is enjoying a new surge of popularity in America. It seems that every generation or two, Americans rediscover the freedom of movement, convenience, and relative affordability of the bicycle. The earliest two-wheeler, the draisine, arrived in Philadelphia in 1819 and astonished onlookers with the possibility of propelling themselves “like lightning.” Two centuries later, the bicycle is still the fastest way to cover ground on gridlocked city streets.

Filled with lively stories, The Mechanical Horse reveals how the bicycle transformed American life. As bicycling caught on in the nineteenth century, many of the country’s rough, rutted roads were paved for the first time, laying a foundation for the interstate highway system. Cyclists were among the first to see the possibilities of self-directed, long-distance travel, and some of them (including a fellow named Henry Ford) went on to develop the automobile. Women shed their cumbersome Victorian dresses—as well as their restricted gender roles—so they could ride. And doctors recognized that aerobic exercise actually benefits the body, which helped to modernize medicine. Margaret Guroff demonstrates that the bicycle’s story is really the story of a more mobile America—one in which physical mobility has opened wider horizons of thought and new opportunities for people in all avenues of life.

Historical linguistics, the oldest field in linguistics, has been traditionally dominated by phonological and etymological investigations. Only in the late twentieth century have linguists begun to focus their interest and research on the area of syntactic change and the insight it provides on the nature of language. This volume represents the first major contribution on the mechanisms of syntactic change.

The fourteen articles that make up this volume were selected from the Symposium on the Mechanisms of Syntactic Change held at the University of California, Santa Barbara, in 1976, one of a series of three conferences sponsored by the National Science Foundation.

These papers clearly demonstrate that the generative approach to the study of language does not explain diachronic processes in syntax. This collection is enlightening, provocative, and carefully documented with data drawn from a great variety of language families.

This book describes the technical design characteristics of the main components that go into forming an artificial hand, whether it is a simple design that does not have a natural appearance, or a more complicated design where there are multiple movements of the fingers and thumb. Mechanical components obviously form the structure of any hand, while there are some lesser known ideas that need to be explored such as how to process a slip signal.

These three volumes deal with the Iron Age grave materials from Magdalenska gora, excavated by the Duchess Paul Friedrich von Mecklenburg-Schwerin. The Duchess of Mecklenburg, a member of an Austrian royal family with estates in Slovenia, conducted her excavations in the early years of the twentieth century. The materials from Magdalenska gora were purchased by the Peabody Museum in the 1930s.

Volume III presents data and analysis of the horse remains and human skeletal materials.

These three volumes deal with the Iron Age grave materials from Magdalenska gora, excavated by the Duchess Paul Friedrich von Mecklenburg-Schwerin. The Duchess of Mecklenburg, a member of an Austrian royal family with estates in Slovenia, conducted her excavations in the early years of the twentieth century. The materials from Magdalenska gora were purchased by the Peabody Museum in the 1930s.

These three volumes deal with the Iron Age grave materials from Magdalenska gora, excavated by the Duchess Paul Friedrich von Mecklenburg-Schwerin. The Duchess of Mecklenburg, a member of an Austrian royal family with estates in Slovenia, conducted her excavations in the early years of the twentieth century. The materials from Magdalenska gora were purchased by the Peabody Museum in the 1930s. Volume I presents data and analysis of the horse remains and human skeletal materials.

As the ground war in Vietnam escalated in the late 1960s, the US government leveraged the so-called doctor draft to secure adequate numbers of medical personnel in the armed forces. Among newly minted physicians’ few alternatives to military service was the Clinical Associate Training Program at the National Institutes of Health. Though only a small percentage of applicants were accepted, the elite program launched an unprecedented number of remarkable scientific careers that would revolutionize medicine at the end of the twentieth century.

Medal Winners recounts this overlooked chapter and unforeseen byproduct of the Vietnam War through the lives of four former NIH clinical associates who would go on to become Nobel laureates. Raymond S. Greenberg traces their stories from their pre-NIH years and apprenticeships through their subsequent Nobel Prize–winning work, which transformed treatment of heart disease, cancer, and other diseases. Greenberg shows how the Vietnam draft unintentionally ushered in a golden era of research by bringing talented young physicians under the tutelage of leading scientists and offers a lesson in what it may take to replicate such a towering center of scientific innovation as the NIH in the 1960s and 1970s.

“The Meddlers is an eye-opening, essential new history that places our international financial institutions in the transition from a world defined by empire to one of nation states enmeshed in the world economy.”
—Adam Tooze, Columbia University

An award-winning history traces the origins of global economic governance—and the political conflicts it generates—to the aftermath of World War I.

International economic institutions like the International Monetary Fund and World Bank exert incredible influence over the domestic policies of many states. These institutions date from the end of World War II and amassed power during the neoliberal era of the late twentieth century. But as Jamie Martin shows, if we want to understand their deeper origins and the ideas and dynamics that shaped their controversial powers, we must turn back to the explosive political struggles that attended the birth of global economic governance in the early twentieth century.

The Meddlers tells the story of the first international institutions to govern the world economy, including the League of Nations and Bank for International Settlements, created after World War I. These institutions endowed civil servants, bankers, and colonial authorities from Europe and the United States with extraordinary powers: to enforce austerity, coordinate the policies of independent central banks, oversee development programs, and regulate commodity prices. In a highly unequal world, they faced a new political challenge: was it possible to reach into sovereign states and empires to intervene in domestic economic policies without generating a backlash?

Martin follows the intense political conflicts provoked by the earliest international efforts to govern capitalism—from Weimar Germany to the Balkans, Nationalist China to colonial Malaya, and the Chilean desert to Wall Street. The Meddlers shows how the fraught problems of sovereignty and democracy posed by institutions like the IMF are not unique to late twentieth-century globalization, but instead first emerged during an earlier period of imperial competition, world war, and economic crisis.

A few months into the popular uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region in 2009/10, the promises of social media, including its ability to influence a participatory governance model, grassroots civic engagement, new social dynamics, inclusive societies and new opportunities for businesses and entrepreneurs, became more evident than ever. Simultaneously, cartography received new considerable interest as it merged with social media platforms. In an attempt to rearticulate the relationship between media and mapping practices, whilst also addressing new and social media, this interdisciplinary book abides by one relatively clear point: space is a media product. The overall focus of this book is accordingly not so much on the role of new technologies and social networks as it is on how media and mapping practices expand the very notion of cultural engagement, political activism, popular protest and social participation.

A beautifully illustrated argument that reveals notebooks as extraordinary paper machines that transformed knowledge on the page and in the mind.

We often think of reason as a fixed entity, as a definitive body of facts that do not change over time. But during the Enlightenment, reason also was seen as a process, as a set of skills enacted on a daily basis. How, why, and where were these skills learned? Concentrating on Scottish students living during the long eighteenth century, this book argues that notebooks were paper machines and that notekeeping was a capability-building exercise that enabled young notekeepers to mobilize everyday handwritten and printed forms of material and visual media in a way that empowered them to judge and enact the enlightened principles they encountered in the classroom. Covering a rich selection of material ranging from simple scribbles to intricate watercolor diagrams, the book reinterprets John Locke’s comparison of the mind to a blank piece of paper, the tabula rasa. Although one of the most recognizable metaphors of the British Enlightenment, scholars seldom consider why it was so successful for those who used it. Each chapter uses one core notekeeping skill to reveal the fascinating world of material culture that enabled students in the arts, sciences, and humanities to transform the tabula rasa metaphor into a dynamic cognitive model. Starting in the home, moving to schools, and ending with universities, the book reconstructs the relationship between media and the mind from the bottom up. It reveals that the cognitive skills required to make and use notebooks were not simply aids to reason; rather, they were part of reason itself.

Exploring how we make, distribute, and consume today’s media systems

Media backends--the electronics, labor, and operations behind our screens--significantly influence our understanding of the sociotechnical relations, economies, and operations of media. Lisa Parks, Julia Velkova, and Sander De Ridder assemble essays that delve into the evolving politics of the media infrastructural landscape. Throughout, the contributors draw on feminist, queer, and intersectional criticism to engage with infrastructural and industrial issues. This focus reflects a concern about the systemic inequalities that emerge when tech companies and designers fail to address workplace discrimination and algorithmic violence and exclusions. Moving from smart phones to smart dust, the essayists examine topics like artificial intelligence, human-machine communication, and links between digital infrastructures and public service media alongside investigations into the algorithmic backends at Netflix and Spotify, Google’s hyperscale data centers, and video-on-demand services in India.

A fascinating foray into an expanding landscape of media studies, Media Backends illuminates the behind-the-screen processes influencing our digital lives. 

Contributors: Mark Andrejevic, Philippe Bouquillion, Jonathan Cohn, Faithe J. Day, Sander De Ridder, Fatima Gaw, Christine Ithurbide, Anne Kaun, Amanda Lagerkvist, Alexis Logsdon, Stine Lomborg, Tim Markham, Vicki Mayer, Rahul Mukherjee, Kaarina Nikunen, Lisa Parks, Vibodh Parthasarathi, Philipp Seuferling, Ranjit Singh, Jacek Smolicki, Fredrik Stiernstedt, Matilda Tudor, Julia Velkova, and Zala Volcic

Today's global media sustains a potent new environmental consciousness. Paradoxically, it also serves as a far-reaching platform that promotes the unsustainable consumption ravaging our planet. Patrick Murphy musters theory, fieldwork, and empirical research to map how the media communicates today's many distinct, competing, and even antagonistic environmental discourses.

The media draws the cultural boundaries of our environmental imagination--and influences just who benefits. Murphy's analysis emphasizes social context, institutional alignments, and commercial media's ways of rendering discussion. He identifies and examines key terms, phrases, and metaphors as well as the ways consumers are presented with ideas like agency and the place of nature. What emerges is the link between pervasive messaging and an "environment" conjured by our media-saturated social imagination. As the author shows, today's complex, integrated media networks shape, frame, and deliver many of our underlying ideas about the environment. Increasingly--and ominously--individuals and communities experience these ideas not only in the developed world but in the increasingly consumption-oriented Global South.

The contributors to Media Crossroads examine space and place in media as they intersect with sexuality, race, ethnicity, age, class, and ability. Considering a wide range of film, television, video games, and other media, the authors show how spaces—from the large and fantastical to the intimate and virtual—are shaped by the social interactions and intersections staged within them. The highly teachable essays include analyses of media representations of urban life and gentrification, the ways video games allow users to adopt an experiential understanding of space, the intersection of the regulation of bodies and spaces, and how style and aesthetics can influence intersectional thinking. Whether interrogating the construction of Portland as a white utopia in Portlandia or the link between queerness and the spatial design and gaming mechanics in the Legend of Zelda video game series, the contributors deepen understanding of screen cultures in ways that redefine conversations around space studies in film and media.

Contributors. Amy Corbin, Desirée J. Garcia, Joshua Glick, Noelle Griffis, Malini Guha, Ina Rae Hark, Peter C. Kunze, Paula J. Massood, Angel Daniel Matos, Nicole Erin Morse, Elizabeth Patton, Matthew Thomas Payne, Merrill Schleier, Jacqueline Sheean, Sarah Louise Smyth, Erica Stein, Kirsten Moana Thompson, John Vanderhoef, Pamela Robertson Wojcik

Media Culture in Nomadic Communities examines the ways that new technologies and ICT infrastructures have changed the communicative norms and patterns that regulate mobile and nomadic communities' engagement in local and international deliberative decision making. Each chapter examines a unique communicative event, such has how the Maasai of Tanzania have used online petitions to demand government action. How Mongolians in northern China have used micro blogs to record and debate land tenure. And how herding communities from around the world have supported the Lakota Sioux protests at Standing Rock. Through these case studies, Hahn argues that mobile and nomadic communities are creating and utilizing new communicative networks that are radically changing local, national, and international deliberations.