A SCHOLARLY BOOK REPOSITORY7 start with W start with W
Warping Time shows how narratives of the past influence what people believe about the present and future state of the world. In Benjamin Ginsberg and Jennifer Bachner’s simple experiments, in which the authors measured the impact of different stories their subjects heard about the past, these “history lessons” moved contemporary policy preferences by an average of 16 percentage points; forecasts of the future moved contemporary policy preferences by an average of 12 percentage points; the two together moved preferences an average of 21 percentage points. And, in an Orwellian twist, the authors estimate that the “history lessons” had an average “erasure effect” of 8.5 percentage points—the difference between those with long-held preferences and those who did not recall that they previously held other opinions before participating in the experiment. The fact that the past, present, and future are subject to human manipulation suggests that history is not simply the product of impersonal forces, material conditions, or past choices. Humans are the architects of history, not its captives. Political reality is tenuous. Changes in our understanding of the past or future can substantially alter perceptions of and action in the present. Finally, the manipulation of time, especially the relationship between past and future, is a powerful political tool.
The people of Taquile Island on the Peruvian side of beautiful Lake Titicaca, the highest navigable lake in the Americas, are renowned for the hand-woven textiles that they both wear and sell to outsiders. One thousand seven hundred Quechua-speaking peasant farmers, who depend on potatoes and the fish from the lake, host the forty thousand tourists who visit their island each year. Yet only twenty-five years ago, few tourists had even heard of Taquile. In Weaving a Future: Tourism, Cloth, and Culture on an Andean Island, Elayne Zorn documents the remarkable transformation of the isolated rocky island into a community-controlled enterprise that now provides a model for indigenous communities worldwide.
Over the course of three decades and nearly two years living on Taquile Island, Zorn, who is trained in both the arts and anthropology, learned to weave from Taquilean women. She also learned how gender structures both the traditional lifestyles and the changes that tourism and transnationalism have brought. In her comprehensive and accessible study, she reveals how Taquileans used their isolation, landownership, and communal organizations to negotiate the pitfalls of globalization and modernization and even to benefit from tourism. This multi-sited ethnography set in Peru, Washington, D.C., and New York City shows why and how cloth remains central to Andean society and how the marketing of textiles provided the experience and money for Taquilean initiatives in controlling tourism.
The first book about tourism in South America that centers on traditional arts as well as community control, Weaving a Future will be of great interest to anthropologists and scholars and practitioners of tourism, grassroots development, and the fiber arts.
Global warming has finally made clear the true costs of using our atmosphere as a giant sponge to soak up unwanted by-products of industrial activity. As nations, businesses, and citizens seek workable yet fair solutions for reducing carbon emissions, the question of who should pay -- and how -- looms large. Yet the surprising truth is that a system for protecting the atmosphere could be devised that would yield cash benefits to us all.
In Who Owns the Sky?, visionary entrepreneur Peter Barnes redefines the debate about the costs and benefits of addressing climate change. He proposes a market-based institution called a Sky Trust that would set limits on carbon emissions and pay dividends to all of us, who collectively own the atmosphere as a commons. The Trust would be funded by requiring polluters to pay for the right to emit carbon dioxide, and managed by a non-governmental agency. Dividends would be paid annually, in much the same way that residents of Alaska today receive cash benefits from oil companies that drill in their state.
Employing the same spirit of innovation that brought millions of dollars to the nonprofit sector through his company Working Assets, Barnes sets forth a practical new approach to protecting our shared inheritance -- not only the atmosphere, but water, forests, and other life-sustaining and economically valuable common resources. He shows how we can use markets and property rights to preserve and share the vast wealth around us, allowing us not only to profit from it, but to pass it on, undiminished, to future generations.
Who Owns the Sky? is a remarkable look at the future of our economy, one in which we can retain capitalism's virtues while mitigating its vices. Peter Barnes draws on his personal experience as a successful entrepreneur to offer viable solutions to some of our most pressing environmental and social concerns.
In the 1970s and 80s, Gibson, the “Godfather of Cyberpunk,” rejuvenated science fiction. In groundbreaking works such as Neuromancer, which changed science fiction as we knew it, Gibson provided us with a language and imaginary through which it became possible to make sense of the newly emerging world of globalization and the digital and media age. Ever since, Gibson’s reformulation of science fiction has provided us not just with radically innovative visions of the future but indeed with trenchant analyses of our historical present and of the emergence and exhaustion of possible futures.
Contributors: Maria Alberto, Andrew M. Butler, Amy J. Elias, Christian Haines, Kylie Korsnack, Mathias Nilges, Malka Older, Aron Pease, Lisa Swanstrom, Takayuki Tatsumi, Sherryl Vint, Phillip E. Wegner, Roger Whitson, Charles Yu
Established as an academic field in the 1970s, women’s studies is a relatively young but rapidly growing area of study. Not only has the number of scholars working in this subject expanded exponentially, but women’s studies has become institutionalized, offering graduate degrees and taking on departmental status in many colleges and universities. At the same time, this field—formed in the wake of the feminist movement—is finding itself in a precarious position in what is now often called a “post-feminist” society. This raises challenging issues for faculty, students, and administrators. How must the field adjust its goals and methods to continue to affect change in the future?
Bringing together essays by newcomers as well as veterans to the field, this essential volume addresses timely questions including:
- Without a unitary understanding of the subject, woman, what is the focus of women’s studies?
- How can women’s studies fulfill the promise of interdisciplinarity?
- What is the continuing place of activism in women’s studies?
- What are the best ways to think about, teach, and act upon the intersections of race, class, gender, disability, nation, and sexuality?
Offering innovative models for research and teaching and compelling new directions for action, Women’s Studies for the Future ensures the continued relevance and influence of this developing field.
Writing into the Future: New American Poetries from “The Dial” to the Digital collects Alan Golding’s essays on the futures (past and present) of poetry and poetics. Throughout the 13 essays gathered in this collection, Golding skillfully joins literary critique with a concern for history and a sociological inquiry into the creation of poetry. In Golding’s view, these are not disparate or even entirely distinct critical tasks. He is able to fruitfully interrogate canons and traditions, both on the page and in the politics of text, culture, and institution.
A central thread running through the chapters is a longstanding interest in how various versions of the “new” have been constructed, received, extended, recycled, resisted, and reanimated in American poetry since modernism. To chart the new, Golding contends with both the production and the reception of poetry, in addition to analyzing the poems themselves. In a generally chronological order, Golding reconsiders the meaning for contemporary poets of high modernists like Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams, as well as the influential poetry venues The Dial and The Little Review, where less prominent but still vital poets contested what should come “next.” Subsequent essays track that contestation through The New American Poetry and later anthologies.
Mid-century major figures like Robert Creeley and George Oppen are discussed in their shared concern for the serial poem. Golding’s essays bring us all the way back to the present of the poetic future, with writing on active poets like Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Susan Howe, and Bruce Andrews and on the anticipation of digital poetics in the material texts of Language writing. Golding charts the work of defining poetry’s future and how we rewrite the past for an unfolding present.
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