A SCHOLARLY BOOK REPOSITORY
Results by Title
39 books about Matter
39 books about Matter
Animals, Mind, and Matter
The Inside Story
Josephine Donovan
Michigan State University Press, 2022
It’s no secret that animals are considered objects in the fields of law, commerce, and science, characterized as property and commodities. Animals, Mind, and Matter: The Inside Story challenges this ascription and establishes that animals are living subjects, who have minds and opinions of their own and care about what happens to them. Donovan contends that animals’ voices or standpoints should be part of any human decisions concerning their ethical treatment. Elaborating on feminist care theory and critical animal standpoint theory, the author provides compelling evidence for animal subjectivity, exploring in the process the nature of subjectivity and consciousness while drawing from recent developments in quantum and emergence theories that point away from the dominant ontology of Cartesian objectivism. Through these explorations, Donovan proposes that a new narrative is emerging in the arts and sciences—an inside story that re-subjectifies natural life and leaves behind the deadening Midas touch of Cartesian objectivism.
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The Architecture of Matter
Stephen Toulmin and June Goodfield
University of Chicago Press, 1982
"Warmly recommended. It is that rare achievement, a lively book which at the same time takes the fullest possible advantage of scholarly knowledge."—Charles C. Gillespie, New York Times Book Review
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Archival Afterlives
Cixous, Derrida, and the Matter of Friendship
Laura Hughes
Northwestern University Press, 2024
A capacious analysis of a legendary intellectual friendship and the material legacies it left behind
Over the course of their decades-long friendship, Hélène Cixous and Jacques Derrida assembled overlapping archives of written experiments and exchanges that document a shared interest in their literary afterlives. In this incisive account, Laura Hughes shows how pushing against the limits of writing and of life itself means not only imagining but manifesting a community of future readers.
Archival Afterlives: Cixous, Derrida, and the Matter of Friendship examines the embodied nature of literary creation, taking letters, fragments, notes, and other ephemera as objects of critical analysis and care. Combining close readings of key texts and previously unexamined archival materials, Hughes traces critical connections between Cixous and Derrida, between the theoretical and the autobiographical, and between life writing and its limits. In putting deconstruction into dialogue with new material analyses and archive studies, Archival Afterlives positions this historical and intellectual relationship as a lens through which to reexamine the legacy of critical theory itself.
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Constitutions of Matter
Mathematically Modeling the Most Everyday of Physical Phenomena
Martin H. Krieger
University of Chicago Press, 1996
In this insightful work, Martin H. Krieger shows what physicists are really doing when they employ mathematical models as research tools. He argues that the technical details of these complex calculations serve not only as a means to an end, but also reveal key aspects of the physical properties they model.
Krieger's lucid discussions will help readers to appreciate the larger physical issues behind the mathematical detail of modern physics and gain deeper insights into how theoretical physicists work. Constitutions of Matter is a rare, behind-the-scenes glimpse into the world of modern physics.
"[Krieger] provides students of physics and applied mathematics with a view of the physical forest behind the mathematical trees, historians and philosophers of science with insights into how theoretical physicists go about their work, and technically advanced general readers with a glimpse into the discipline."—Scitech Book News
Krieger's lucid discussions will help readers to appreciate the larger physical issues behind the mathematical detail of modern physics and gain deeper insights into how theoretical physicists work. Constitutions of Matter is a rare, behind-the-scenes glimpse into the world of modern physics.
"[Krieger] provides students of physics and applied mathematics with a view of the physical forest behind the mathematical trees, historians and philosophers of science with insights into how theoretical physicists go about their work, and technically advanced general readers with a glimpse into the discipline."—Scitech Book News
[more]
Consult Them in the Matter
A Nineteenth-Century Islamic Argument for Constitutional Government
Ahmad ibn Abi Diyaf
University of Arkansas Press, 2005
The 2005 winner of the The Arkansas Arabic Traslation Award, sponsored by the King Fahd Center for Middle East and Islamic Studies at the University of Arkansas and the University of Arkansas Press, though written in the nineteenth century, is a richly contextualized precursor of modern Muslim wrestlings with notions of democracy and constitutionalism. Translated by the distinguished Middle East historian L. Carl Brown, this important historical work is now available to English language readers for the first time. Toward the end of his long career as an official in the Tunisian government, Ahmad ibn Abi Diyaf (Bin Diyaf) took on the task of writing a history of his country. The result was a multivolume history, concentrating on the period that Bin Diyaf experienced first-hand from within the small circle of Tunisia’s government, where he had served from the 1820s to the 1860s. It was as if a Harry Hopkins, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., or Henry Kissinger had served not just a Roosevelt, Kennedy, or Nixon, but all three presidents for an unbroken forty-year period. Not only the most penetrating and most perceptive study of nineteenth-century Tunisian political life, Bin Diyaf’s history was illustrative of the activities and ideas in play throughout the larger Ottoman world. His work was a history with a thesis. Bin Diyaf sought to show the need for his country, and for that matter the larger Ottoman world, to adopt representative and responsive forms of government as existed in Europe. His purpose was most clearly set out in the Muqaddima or Introduction to his monumental work, which Brown has translated. The ideas produced in this text roughly a century and a half ago were not institutionalized, but they did catch hold as ideas and goals influencing later developments.
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Cosmic Blueprint
New Discoveries In Natures Ability To Order Universe
Paul Davies
Templeton Press, 2004
In this critically acclaimed book, first published in 1988 and now reprinted in paperback, scientist and author Paul Davies explains how recent scientific advances are transforming our understanding of the emergence of complexity and organization in the universe.
Melding a variety of ideas and disciplines from biology, fundamental physics, computer science, mathematics, genetics, and neurology, Davies presents his provocative theory on the source of the universe's creative potency. He explores the new paradigm (replacing the centuries-old Newtonian view of the universe) that recognizes the collective and holistic properties of physical systems and the power of self-organization. He casts the laws in physics in the role of a "blueprint," embodying a grand cosmic scheme that progressively unfolds as the universe develops.
Challenging the viewpoint that the physical universe is a meaningless collection of particles, he finds overwhelming evidence for an underlying purpose: "Science may explain all the processes whereby the universe evolves its own destiny, but that still leaves room for there to be a meaning behind existence."
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Descartes' Metaphysical Physics
Daniel Garber
University of Chicago Press, 1992
In this first book-length treatment of Descartes' important and influential natural philosophy, Daniel Garber is principally concerned with Descartes' accounts of matter and motion—the joint between Descartes' philosophical and scientific interests. These accounts constitute the point at which the metaphysical doctrines on God, the soul, and body, developed in writings like the Meditations, give rise to physical conclusions regarding atoms, vacua, and the laws that matter in motion must obey.
Garber achieves a philosophically rigorous reading of Descartes that is sensitive to the historical and intellectual context in which he wrote. What emerges is a novel view of this familiar figure, at once unexpected and truer to the historical Descartes.
The book begins with a discussion of Descartes' intellectual development and the larger project that frames his natural philosophy, the complete reform of all the sciences. After this introduction Garber thoroughly examines various aspects of Descartes' physics: the notion of body and its identification with extension; Descartes' rejection of the substantial forms of the scholastics; his relation to the atomistic tradition of atoms and the void; the concept of motion and the laws of motion, including Descartes' conservation principle, his laws of the persistence of motion, and his collision law; and the grounding of his laws in God.
Garber achieves a philosophically rigorous reading of Descartes that is sensitive to the historical and intellectual context in which he wrote. What emerges is a novel view of this familiar figure, at once unexpected and truer to the historical Descartes.
The book begins with a discussion of Descartes' intellectual development and the larger project that frames his natural philosophy, the complete reform of all the sciences. After this introduction Garber thoroughly examines various aspects of Descartes' physics: the notion of body and its identification with extension; Descartes' rejection of the substantial forms of the scholastics; his relation to the atomistic tradition of atoms and the void; the concept of motion and the laws of motion, including Descartes' conservation principle, his laws of the persistence of motion, and his collision law; and the grounding of his laws in God.
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The Fernando Coronil Reader
The Struggle for Life Is the Matter
Fernando Coronil
Duke University Press, 2019
In The Fernando Coronil Reader Venezuelan anthropologist Fernando Coronil challenges us to rethink our approaches to key contemporary epistemological, political, and ethical questions. Consisting of work written between 1991 and 2011, this posthumously published collection includes Coronil's landmark essays “Beyond Occidentalism” and “The Future in Question” as well as two chapters from his unfinished book manuscript, "Crude Matters." Taken together, the essays highlight his deep concern with the Global South, Latin American state formation, theories of nature, empire, and postcolonialism, and anthrohistory as an intellectual and ethical approach. Presenting a cross section of Coronil's oeuvre, this volume cements his legacy as one of the most innovative critical social thinkers of his generation.
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The Flesh of the Matter
A Critical Forum on Hortense Spillers
Edited by Margo Natalie Crawford and C. Riley Snorton
Vanderbilt University Press, 2024
PROSE Awards Category Winner—Media and Cultural Studies, 2025
Hortense Spillers is one of the most important literary critics and Black feminist scholars of the last fifty years. Her 1987 scholarly article “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book” is one of the most-cited essays in African American literary studies.
Edited by Margo Natalie Crawford and C. Riley Snorton, The Flesh of the Matter: A Critical Forum on Hortense Spillers is the first collection to take up directly how Spillers’s writing on literature, culture, and theory have been signal posts to the varied and universal threads of Black thought, as well as countless other areas of the academy. Interspersed with archival fragments from Spillers’s papers kept at the Pembroke Center for Feminist Thought at Brown University, the fourteen essays in this collection demonstrate a fidelity to the ways of reading Spillers has taught us, the nomenclature of enslavement keyed into the American lexicon, and the ways that history permeates our cultural boundaries today.
Hortense Spillers is one of the most important literary critics and Black feminist scholars of the last fifty years. Her 1987 scholarly article “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book” is one of the most-cited essays in African American literary studies.
Edited by Margo Natalie Crawford and C. Riley Snorton, The Flesh of the Matter: A Critical Forum on Hortense Spillers is the first collection to take up directly how Spillers’s writing on literature, culture, and theory have been signal posts to the varied and universal threads of Black thought, as well as countless other areas of the academy. Interspersed with archival fragments from Spillers’s papers kept at the Pembroke Center for Feminist Thought at Brown University, the fourteen essays in this collection demonstrate a fidelity to the ways of reading Spillers has taught us, the nomenclature of enslavement keyed into the American lexicon, and the ways that history permeates our cultural boundaries today.
[more]
How Climate Change Comes to Matter
The Communal Life of Facts
Candis Callison
Duke University Press, 2014
During the past decade, skepticism about climate change has frustrated those seeking to engage broad publics and motivate them to take action on the issue. In this innovative ethnography, Candis Callison examines the initiatives of social and professional groups as they encourage diverse American publics to care about climate change. She explores the efforts of science journalists, scientists who have become expert voices for and about climate change, American evangelicals, Indigenous leaders, and advocates for corporate social responsibility.
The disparate efforts of these groups illuminate the challenge of maintaining fidelity to scientific facts while transforming them into ethical and moral calls to action. Callison investigates the different vernaculars through which we understand and articulate our worlds, as well as the nuanced and pluralistic understandings of climate change evident in different forms of advocacy. As she demonstrates, climate change offers an opportunity to look deeply at how issues and problems that begin in a scientific context come to matter to wide publics, and to rethink emerging interactions among different kinds of knowledge and experience, evolving media landscapes, and claims to authority and expertise.
The disparate efforts of these groups illuminate the challenge of maintaining fidelity to scientific facts while transforming them into ethical and moral calls to action. Callison investigates the different vernaculars through which we understand and articulate our worlds, as well as the nuanced and pluralistic understandings of climate change evident in different forms of advocacy. As she demonstrates, climate change offers an opportunity to look deeply at how issues and problems that begin in a scientific context come to matter to wide publics, and to rethink emerging interactions among different kinds of knowledge and experience, evolving media landscapes, and claims to authority and expertise.
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Laughing Atoms, Laughing Matter
Lucretius' De Rerum Natura and Satire
T. H. M. Gellar-Goad
University of Michigan Press, 2020
Laughing Atoms, Laughing Matter: Lucretius' De Rerum Natura and Satire offers the first comprehensive examination of Roman epic poet Lucretius’ engagement with satire. Author T. H. M. Gellar-Goad argues that what has often been understood as an artfully persuasive exposition of Epicurean philosophy designed to convert the uninitiated is actually a mimesis of the narrator’s attempt to effect such a conversion on his internal narrative audience—a performance for the true audience of the poem, whose members take pleasure from uncovering the literary games and the intertextual engagement that the performance entails.
Gellar-Goad aims to track De Rerum Natura along two paths of satire: first, the broad boulevard of satiric literature from the beginnings of Greek poetry to the plays, essays, and broadcast media of the modern world; and second, the narrower lane of Roman verse satire, satura, beginning with early authors Ennius and Lucilius and closing with Flavian poet Juvenal. Lucilius is revealed as a major, yet overlooked, influence on Lucretius.
By examining how Lucretius’ poem employs the tools of satire, we gain a richer understanding of how it interacts with its purported philosophical program.
Gellar-Goad aims to track De Rerum Natura along two paths of satire: first, the broad boulevard of satiric literature from the beginnings of Greek poetry to the plays, essays, and broadcast media of the modern world; and second, the narrower lane of Roman verse satire, satura, beginning with early authors Ennius and Lucilius and closing with Flavian poet Juvenal. Lucilius is revealed as a major, yet overlooked, influence on Lucretius.
By examining how Lucretius’ poem employs the tools of satire, we gain a richer understanding of how it interacts with its purported philosophical program.
[more]
The Limits of Matter
Chemistry, Mining, and Enlightenment
Hjalmar Fors
University of Chicago Press, 2014
During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Europeans raised a number of questions about the nature of reality and found their answers to be different from those that had satisfied their forebears. They discounted tales of witches, trolls, magic, and miraculous transformations and instead began looking elsewhere to explain the world around them. In The Limits of Matter, Hjalmar Fors investigates how conceptions of matter changed during the Enlightenment and pins this important change in European culture to the formation of the modern discipline of chemistry.
Fors reveals how, early in the eighteenth century, chemists began to view metals no longer as the ingredients for “chrysopoeia”—or gold making—but as elemental substances, or the basic building blocks of matter. At the center of this emerging idea, argues Fors, was the Bureau of Mines of the Swedish State, which saw the practical and profitable potential of these materials in the economies of mining and smelting.
By studying the chemists at the Swedish Bureau of Mines and their networks, and integrating their practices into the wider European context, Fors illustrates how they and their successors played a significant role in the development of our modern notion of matter and made a significant contribution to the modern European view of reality.
Fors reveals how, early in the eighteenth century, chemists began to view metals no longer as the ingredients for “chrysopoeia”—or gold making—but as elemental substances, or the basic building blocks of matter. At the center of this emerging idea, argues Fors, was the Bureau of Mines of the Swedish State, which saw the practical and profitable potential of these materials in the economies of mining and smelting.
By studying the chemists at the Swedish Bureau of Mines and their networks, and integrating their practices into the wider European context, Fors illustrates how they and their successors played a significant role in the development of our modern notion of matter and made a significant contribution to the modern European view of reality.
[more]
Lunar
A History of the Moon in Myths, Maps, and Matter
Edited by Matthew Shindell
University of Chicago Press, 2024
The first book to combine exquisite cartographical charts of the Moon with a thorough exploration of the Moon’s role in popular culture, science, and myth.
President John F. Kennedy’s rousing “We will go to the Moon” speech in 1961 before the US Congress catalyzed the celebrated Apollo program, spurring the US Geological Survey’s scientists to map the Moon. Over the next eleven years a team of twenty-two, including a dozen illustrator-cartographers, created forty-four charts that forever changed the path of space exploration.
For the first time, each of those beautifully hand-drawn, colorful charts is presented together in one stunning book. In Lunar, National Air and Space Museum curator Matthew Shindell’s expert commentary accompanies each chart, along with the key geological characteristics and interpretations that were set out in the original Geologic Atlas of the Moon. Interwoven throughout the book are contributions from scholars devoted to studying the multifaceted significance of the Moon to humankind around the world. Traveling from the Stone Age to the present day, they explore a wide range of topics: the prehistoric lunar calendar; the role of the Moon in creation myths of Ancient Egypt, Greece, and Rome; the role of the Moon in astrology; the importance of the Moon in establishing an Earth-centered solar system; the association of the Moon with madness and the menstrual cycle; how the Moon governs the tides; and the use of the Moon in surrealist art.
Combining a thoughtful retelling of the Moon’s cultural associations throughout history with the beautifully illustrated and scientifically accurate charting of its surface, Lunar is a stunning celebration of the Moon in all its guises.
President John F. Kennedy’s rousing “We will go to the Moon” speech in 1961 before the US Congress catalyzed the celebrated Apollo program, spurring the US Geological Survey’s scientists to map the Moon. Over the next eleven years a team of twenty-two, including a dozen illustrator-cartographers, created forty-four charts that forever changed the path of space exploration.
For the first time, each of those beautifully hand-drawn, colorful charts is presented together in one stunning book. In Lunar, National Air and Space Museum curator Matthew Shindell’s expert commentary accompanies each chart, along with the key geological characteristics and interpretations that were set out in the original Geologic Atlas of the Moon. Interwoven throughout the book are contributions from scholars devoted to studying the multifaceted significance of the Moon to humankind around the world. Traveling from the Stone Age to the present day, they explore a wide range of topics: the prehistoric lunar calendar; the role of the Moon in creation myths of Ancient Egypt, Greece, and Rome; the role of the Moon in astrology; the importance of the Moon in establishing an Earth-centered solar system; the association of the Moon with madness and the menstrual cycle; how the Moon governs the tides; and the use of the Moon in surrealist art.
Combining a thoughtful retelling of the Moon’s cultural associations throughout history with the beautifully illustrated and scientifically accurate charting of its surface, Lunar is a stunning celebration of the Moon in all its guises.
[more]
Matter
Bin Ramke
University of Iowa Press, 2004
Bin Ramke’s poetry has always been concerned with separating the real from the wished-for or the feared. In Matter, Ramke investigates not only the physical realities of our world but the qualities that make things important to us, that give them weight. These poems, often in the voice of a child, are full of yearning and anguish but also an appreciation for the enhanced perceptions and small pleasures to be found among the sadness. “All lost things have the same voice,” he says, and this universal voice reminds us of home and family and the simple connections of ordinary life—the things that matter.
“When I was a saint,” begins the first poem, “I did not have visions but I could see and did note the color of the world.” Matter is an examination of and a report on the world’s variable colors and possibilities for, if not sanctity, then a certain sanity, a kindness, and some form of salvation.
“When I was a saint,” begins the first poem, “I did not have visions but I could see and did note the color of the world.” Matter is an examination of and a report on the world’s variable colors and possibilities for, if not sanctity, then a certain sanity, a kindness, and some form of salvation.
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Matter and Mathematics
An Essential Account of Laws of Nature
Andrew Younan
Catholic University of America Press, 2022
To borrow a phrase from Galileo: What does it mean that the story of the creation is “written in the language of mathematics?” This book is an attempt to understand the natural world, its consistency, and the ontology of what we call laws of nature, with a special focus on their mathematical expression. It does this by arguing in favor of the Essentialist interpretation over that of the Humean and Anti-Humean accounts. It re-examines and critiques Descartes’ notion of laws of nature following from God’s activity in the world as mover of extended bodies, as well as Hume’s arguments against causality and induction. It then presents an Aristotelian-Thomistic account of laws of nature based on mathematical abstraction, necessity, and teleology, finally offering a definition for laws of nature within this framework.
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The Matter of Black Living
The Aesthetic Experiment of Racial Data, 1880–1930
Autumn Womack
University of Chicago Press, 2022
Examining how turn-of-the-century Black cultural producers’ experiments with new technologies of racial data produced experimental aesthetics.
As the nineteenth century came to a close and questions concerning the future of African American life reached a fever pitch, many social scientists and reformers approached post-emancipation Black life as an empirical problem that could be systematically solved with the help of new technologies like the social survey, photography, and film. What ensued was nothing other than a “racial data revolution,” one which rendered African American life an inanimate object of inquiry in the name of social order and racial regulation. At the very same time, African American cultural producers and intellectuals such as W. E. B. Du Bois, Kelly Miller, Sutton Griggs, and Zora Neale Hurston staged their own kind of revolution, un-disciplining racial data in ways that captured the dynamism of Black social life.
The Matter of Black Living excavates the dynamic interplay between racial data and Black aesthetic production that shaped late nineteenth-century social, cultural, and literary atmosphere. Through assembling previously overlooked archives and seemingly familiar texts, Womack shows how these artists and writers recalibrated the relationship between data and Black life. The result is a fresh and nuanced take on the history of documenting Blackness. The Matter of Black Living charts a new genealogy from which we can rethink the political and aesthetic work of racial data, a task that has never been more urgent.
As the nineteenth century came to a close and questions concerning the future of African American life reached a fever pitch, many social scientists and reformers approached post-emancipation Black life as an empirical problem that could be systematically solved with the help of new technologies like the social survey, photography, and film. What ensued was nothing other than a “racial data revolution,” one which rendered African American life an inanimate object of inquiry in the name of social order and racial regulation. At the very same time, African American cultural producers and intellectuals such as W. E. B. Du Bois, Kelly Miller, Sutton Griggs, and Zora Neale Hurston staged their own kind of revolution, un-disciplining racial data in ways that captured the dynamism of Black social life.
The Matter of Black Living excavates the dynamic interplay between racial data and Black aesthetic production that shaped late nineteenth-century social, cultural, and literary atmosphere. Through assembling previously overlooked archives and seemingly familiar texts, Womack shows how these artists and writers recalibrated the relationship between data and Black life. The result is a fresh and nuanced take on the history of documenting Blackness. The Matter of Black Living charts a new genealogy from which we can rethink the political and aesthetic work of racial data, a task that has never been more urgent.
[more]
A Matter of Choices
Memoirs of a Female Physicist
Fay Ajzenberg-Selove
Rutgers University Press, 1994
When Fay Ajzenberg-Selove became a nuclear physicist, the number of women in the field could be counted on one hand. In this engaging memoir, Fay Ajzenberg-Selove writes candidly about her difficult journey to international recognition in physics. She is frank about the ways being a woman has made a difference in her opportunities and choices as a scientist--and how, by being a woman, she has made a difference in the world of physics.
Ajzenberg-Selove came to America at the age of 15 after narrowly escaping the Nazi takeover of France. She had planned to become an engineer like her father, but switched to physics after she was told the only engineering jobs open to women were in drafting: Marie Curie's example proved to her that women could do physics. Her first attempt at graduate work at Columbia University was a disaster, but she was sturck with the intellectual beauty of the field. After taking a Ph.D. in physics at University of Wisconsin, she did post-doctoral work with Thomas Lauritsen at the California Institute of Technology, where she began writing the first of a series of major review papers on the nuclear spectroscopy of the light nuclei, a subject of fundamental importance to nuclear physics, astrophysics, and applied physics. She continued this work and experimental research for thirty-eight years while teaching at Boston University, Haverford College, and the University of Pennsylvania.
During her early career, Ajzenberg-Selove was shielded by her male mentors from experiencing much of the discrimination directed against women in science. Her simultaneous battles to become a tenured professor and to overcome breast cancer opened her eyes and confirmed her as a feminist.
The lay reader and the scientist alike will be fascinated by Ajzenberg-Selove's clear portrayal of her interlinked lives as physicist, teacher, wife of particle physicist, Walter Selove, and a woman who relishes both competition and friendship in a male-dominated field. An invaluable book for anyone contemplating a career in science.
Ajzenberg-Selove came to America at the age of 15 after narrowly escaping the Nazi takeover of France. She had planned to become an engineer like her father, but switched to physics after she was told the only engineering jobs open to women were in drafting: Marie Curie's example proved to her that women could do physics. Her first attempt at graduate work at Columbia University was a disaster, but she was sturck with the intellectual beauty of the field. After taking a Ph.D. in physics at University of Wisconsin, she did post-doctoral work with Thomas Lauritsen at the California Institute of Technology, where she began writing the first of a series of major review papers on the nuclear spectroscopy of the light nuclei, a subject of fundamental importance to nuclear physics, astrophysics, and applied physics. She continued this work and experimental research for thirty-eight years while teaching at Boston University, Haverford College, and the University of Pennsylvania.
During her early career, Ajzenberg-Selove was shielded by her male mentors from experiencing much of the discrimination directed against women in science. Her simultaneous battles to become a tenured professor and to overcome breast cancer opened her eyes and confirmed her as a feminist.
The lay reader and the scientist alike will be fascinated by Ajzenberg-Selove's clear portrayal of her interlinked lives as physicist, teacher, wife of particle physicist, Walter Selove, and a woman who relishes both competition and friendship in a male-dominated field. An invaluable book for anyone contemplating a career in science.
[more]
The Matter of Disability
Materiality, Biopolitics, Crip Affect
David T. Mitchell, Susan Antebi, and Sharon L. Snyder, Editors
University of Michigan Press, 2019
The Matter of Disability returns disability to its proper place as an ongoing historical process of corporeal, cognitive, and sensory mutation operating in a world of dynamic, even cataclysmic, change. The book’s contributors offer new theorizations of human and nonhuman embodiments and their complex evolutions in our global present, in essays that explore how disability might be imagined as participant in the “complex elaboration of difference,” rather than something gone awry in an otherwise stable process. This alternative approach to materiality sheds new light on the capacities that exist within the depictions of disability that the book examines, including Spider-Man, Of Mice and Men, and Bloodchild.
[more]
The Matter of Evil
From Speculative Realism to Ethical Pessimism
Drew M. Dalton
Northwestern University Press, 2024
A provocative and entirely new account of ethical reasoning that reconceives the traditional understanding of ethical action negatively
In this radical reconsideration of ethical reasoning in contemporary European philosophy, Drew M. Dalton makes the case for an absolutely grounded account of ethical normativity developed from a scientifically informed and purely materialistic metaphysics. Expanding on speculative realist arguments, Dalton argues that the limits placed on the nature of ethical judgments by Kant’s critique can be overcome through a moral evaluation of the laws of nature—specifically, the entropic principle that undergirds the laws of physics, chemistry, and biology. In order to extract a moral meaning from this simple material fact, Dalton scrutinizes the presumptions of classical accounts and traditional understandings of good and evil within the history of Western philosophy and ultimately asserts that ethical normativity can be reestablished absolutely without reverting to dogmatism.
By overturning our assumptions about the nature and value of reality, The Matter of Evil: From Speculative Realism to Ethical Pessimism presents a provocative new model of ethical responsibility that is both logically justifiable and scientifically sound. Dalton argues for “ethical pessimism,” a position previously marginalized in the West, as a means to cultivate an account of ethical responsibility and political activism that takes seriously the unbecoming of being and the moral horror of existence.
In this radical reconsideration of ethical reasoning in contemporary European philosophy, Drew M. Dalton makes the case for an absolutely grounded account of ethical normativity developed from a scientifically informed and purely materialistic metaphysics. Expanding on speculative realist arguments, Dalton argues that the limits placed on the nature of ethical judgments by Kant’s critique can be overcome through a moral evaluation of the laws of nature—specifically, the entropic principle that undergirds the laws of physics, chemistry, and biology. In order to extract a moral meaning from this simple material fact, Dalton scrutinizes the presumptions of classical accounts and traditional understandings of good and evil within the history of Western philosophy and ultimately asserts that ethical normativity can be reestablished absolutely without reverting to dogmatism.
By overturning our assumptions about the nature and value of reality, The Matter of Evil: From Speculative Realism to Ethical Pessimism presents a provocative new model of ethical responsibility that is both logically justifiable and scientifically sound. Dalton argues for “ethical pessimism,” a position previously marginalized in the West, as a means to cultivate an account of ethical responsibility and political activism that takes seriously the unbecoming of being and the moral horror of existence.
[more]
A Matter of Facts
The Value of Evidence in an Information Age
Laura A. Millar
American Library Association, 2019
“Like Orwell and Bradbury, like Stanley and Siskind, Laura Millar has written a book that people in the future will look back on and say, ‘This is one of the books that helped us to survive until a new era.’” — from the Foreword by Lee McIntyre
The safeguarding of authentic facts is essential, especially in this disruptive Orwellian age, where digital technologies have opened the door to a post-truth world in which “alternative facts” can be so easily accepted as valid. And because facts matter, evidence matters. In this urgent manifesto, archives luminary Millar makes the case that authentic and accurate records, archives, data, and other sources of documentary proof are crucial in supporting and fostering a society that is respectful, democratic, and self-aware. An eye-opening treatise for the general public, an invaluable resource for archives students, and a provocative call-to-arms for information and records professionals, Millar’s book
- explains the concept of evidence and discusses the ways in which records, archives, and data are not just useful tools for our daily existence but also essential sources of evidence both today and in the future;
- includes plentiful examples that illustrate the critical role evidence plays in upholding rights, enforcing responsibilities, tracing family or community stories, and capturing and sharing memories; and
- examines the impact of digital technologies on how records and information are created and used.
With documentary examples ranging from Mesopotamian clay tablets to World War II photographs to today’s Twitter messages and Facebook posts, Millar’s stirring book will encourage readers to understand more fully the importance of their own records and archives, for themselves and for future generations.
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The Matter of Language
Abstraction and Poetry
Benjamin Noys
Seagull Books, 2023
A critical intervention on the relationship between language and matter.
If the twentieth century was the century in which language was at the center of thought, the twenty-first century has, so far, been the century of matter. The Matter of Language is a critical intervention that aims to return to the relationship between language and matter to think of our present moment as one dominated by abstractions that rule our lives. In a series of dated chapters, that form punctual moments of intervention, this book both rehabilitates key thinkers, like Marx, Freud, and Saussure, and engages with poetic thinking on matter in David Jones, Diane di Prima, William Blake, Leslie Kaplan, and others. It is a matter of understanding language as a site of struggle, which is intimately bound to the material but also crucial in formulating and expressing the material and the abstractions that shape language and matter. Working between theory and poetry, The Matter of Language reconceives notions of alienation and class struggle as essential modes of reading and analysis for our fractured present.
If the twentieth century was the century in which language was at the center of thought, the twenty-first century has, so far, been the century of matter. The Matter of Language is a critical intervention that aims to return to the relationship between language and matter to think of our present moment as one dominated by abstractions that rule our lives. In a series of dated chapters, that form punctual moments of intervention, this book both rehabilitates key thinkers, like Marx, Freud, and Saussure, and engages with poetic thinking on matter in David Jones, Diane di Prima, William Blake, Leslie Kaplan, and others. It is a matter of understanding language as a site of struggle, which is intimately bound to the material but also crucial in formulating and expressing the material and the abstractions that shape language and matter. Working between theory and poetry, The Matter of Language reconceives notions of alienation and class struggle as essential modes of reading and analysis for our fractured present.
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A Matter of Life and Death
Hunting in Contemporary Vermont
Marc Boglioli
University of Massachusetts Press, 2009
American hunters occupy a remarkably complex place in this country's cultural and political landscape. On the one hand, they are cast as perpetrators of an anachronistic and unnecessary assault on innocent wildlife. On the other hand, they are lauded as exemplars of no-nonsense American rugged individualism. Yet despite the passion that surrounds the subject, we rarely hear the unfiltered voices of actual hunters in discussions of hunting.
In A Matter of Life and Death, anthropologist Marc Boglioli puts a human face on a group widely regarded as morally suspect, one that currently stands in the crossfire of America's so-called culture wars. Drawing on extensive ethnographic fieldwork in Addison County, Vermont, which took him from hunting camps and sporting goods stores to local bars and kitchen tables, Boglioli focuses on how contemporary hunters, women as well as men, understand their relationship to their prey. He shows how hunters' attitudes toward animals flow directly from the rural lifeways they have continued to maintain in the face of encroaching urban sensibilities. The result is a rare glimpse into a culture that experiences wild animals in a way that is at once violent, consumptive, and respectful, and that regards hunting as an enduring link to a vanishing past. It is a book that will challenge readers—hunters, non-hunters, and anti-hunters alike—to reconsider what constitutes a morally appropriate relationship with the non-human residents of this planet.
In A Matter of Life and Death, anthropologist Marc Boglioli puts a human face on a group widely regarded as morally suspect, one that currently stands in the crossfire of America's so-called culture wars. Drawing on extensive ethnographic fieldwork in Addison County, Vermont, which took him from hunting camps and sporting goods stores to local bars and kitchen tables, Boglioli focuses on how contemporary hunters, women as well as men, understand their relationship to their prey. He shows how hunters' attitudes toward animals flow directly from the rural lifeways they have continued to maintain in the face of encroaching urban sensibilities. The result is a rare glimpse into a culture that experiences wild animals in a way that is at once violent, consumptive, and respectful, and that regards hunting as an enduring link to a vanishing past. It is a book that will challenge readers—hunters, non-hunters, and anti-hunters alike—to reconsider what constitutes a morally appropriate relationship with the non-human residents of this planet.
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A Matter of Moral Justice
Black Women Laundry Workers and the Fight for Justice
Jenny Carson
University of Illinois Press, 2021
A long-overlooked group of workers and their battle for rights and dignity
Like thousands of African American women, Charlotte Adelmond and Dollie Robinson worked in New York’s power laundry industry in the 1930s. Jenny Carson tells the story of how substandard working conditions, racial and gender discrimination, and poor pay drove them to help unionize the city’s laundry workers. Laundry work opened a door for African American women to enter industry, and their numbers allowed women like Adelmond and Robinson to join the vanguard of a successful unionization effort. But an affiliation with the powerful Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) transformed the union from a radical, community-based institution into a bureaucratic organization led by men. It also launched a difficult battle to secure economic and social justice for the mostly women and people of color in the plants. As Carson shows, this local struggle highlighted how race and gender shaped worker conditions, labor organizing, and union politics across the country in the twentieth century.
Like thousands of African American women, Charlotte Adelmond and Dollie Robinson worked in New York’s power laundry industry in the 1930s. Jenny Carson tells the story of how substandard working conditions, racial and gender discrimination, and poor pay drove them to help unionize the city’s laundry workers. Laundry work opened a door for African American women to enter industry, and their numbers allowed women like Adelmond and Robinson to join the vanguard of a successful unionization effort. But an affiliation with the powerful Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) transformed the union from a radical, community-based institution into a bureaucratic organization led by men. It also launched a difficult battle to secure economic and social justice for the mostly women and people of color in the plants. As Carson shows, this local struggle highlighted how race and gender shaped worker conditions, labor organizing, and union politics across the country in the twentieth century.
Meticulous and engaging, A Matter of Moral Justice examines the role of African American and radical women activists and their collisions with labor organizing and union politics.
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A Matter of Rats
A Short Biography of Patna
Amitava Kumar
Duke University Press, 2014
It is not only the past that lies in ruins in Patna, it is also the present. But that is not the only truth about the city that Amitava Kumar explores in this vivid, entertaining account of his hometown. We accompany him through many Patnas, the myriad cities locked within the city—the shabby reality of the present-day capital of Bihar; Pataliputra, the storied city of emperors; the dreamlike embodiment of the city in the minds and hearts of those who have escaped contemporary Patna's confines. Full of fascinating observations and impressions, A Matter of Rats reveals a challenging and enduring city that exerts a lasting pull on all those who drift into its orbit.
Kumar's ruminations on one of the world's oldest cities, the capital of India's poorest province, are also a meditation on how to write about place. His memory is partial. All he has going for him is his attentiveness. He carefully observes everything that surrounds him in Patna: rats and poets, artists and politicians, a girl's picture in a historian's study, and a sheet of paper on his mother's desk. The result is this unique book, as cutting as it is honest.
Kumar's ruminations on one of the world's oldest cities, the capital of India's poorest province, are also a meditation on how to write about place. His memory is partial. All he has going for him is his attentiveness. He carefully observes everything that surrounds him in Patna: rats and poets, artists and politicians, a girl's picture in a historian's study, and a sheet of paper on his mother's desk. The result is this unique book, as cutting as it is honest.
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The Matter of the Page
Essays in Search of Ancient and Medieval Authors
Shane Butler
University of Wisconsin Press, 2010
Ancient and medieval literary texts often call attention to their existence as physical objects. Shane Butler helps us to understand why. Arguing that writing has always been as much a material struggle as an intellectual one, The Matter of the Page offers timely lessons for the digital age about how creativity works and why literature moves us.
Butler begins with some considerations about the materiality of the literary text, both as a process (the draft) and a product (the book), and he traces the curious history of “the page” from scroll to manuscript codex to printed book and beyond. He then offers a series of unforgettable portraits of authors at work: Thucydides struggling to describe his own diseased body; Vergil ready to burn an epic poem he could not finish; Lucretius wrestling with words even as he fights the madness that will drive him to suicide; Cicero mesmerized by the thought of erasing his entire career; Seneca plumbing the depths of the soul in the wax of his tablets; and Dhuoda, who sees the book she writes as a door, a tunnel, a womb. Butler reveals how the work of writing transformed each of these authors into his or her own first reader, and he explains what this metamorphosis teaches us about how we too should read.
All Greek and Latin quotations are translated into English and technical matters are carefully explained for general readers, with scholarly details in the notes.
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A Matter of Time
Alex Capus
Haus Publishing, 2009
A little known backwater of the history of the Great War is vividly rendered by a great story-teller - the central characters and events of this book are based on fact, but their surroundings and experiences are richly drawn from the author's imagination and detailed research.
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A Matter of Trust
Building Integrity into Data, Statistics and Records to Support the Sustainable Development Goals
Edited by Anne Thurston
University of London Press, 2020
The United Nations Sustainable Development Goals initiative has the potential to set the direction for a future world that works for everyone. Approved by 193 United Nations member countries in September 2016 to help guide global and national development policies through the year 2030, the seventeen goals build on the successes of the Millennium Development Goals, but also include new priority areas, such as climate change, economic inequality, innovation, sustainable consumption, peace, and justice. Assessed against commonly agreed targets and indicators, the goals should facilitate inter-governmental cooperation and the development of regional and even global development strategies. This book explores, through a series of case studies, the substantial challenges for assembling reliable data and statistics to address pressing development challenges, particularly in Africa. By highlighting the enormous potential value of creating and using high quality data, statistics, and records as an interconnected resource and describing how this can be achieved, the book will contribute to defining meaningful and realistic global and national development policies in the critical period to 2030.
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Matterphorics
On the Laws of Theory
Daniela Gandorfer
Duke University Press, 2026
In Matterphorics, Daniela Gandorfer challenges modernist legal theory’s separation of concepts from matter, developing a mode of theory attuned to indeterminacy, relationality, and material entanglement. Gandorfer offers a method for generating legal concepts that respond to ontological complexity rather than reducing the world to fixed categories or representational entities. Through a range of recent case studies ranging from outer space exploration and Red Bull’s high-altitude freefalls to seabed mining, cryonics, and the copyrighting of DNA, she shows how law is unsettled when confronted with technological frontiers and planetary transformations. Instead of treating law as an abstract system, she proposes it as a creative and situated practice—one that must continually reimagine its concepts in response to shifting relations between matter, technology, and thought. In so doing, Gandorfer formulates legal theory as a creative and situated response to planetary and technological transformation.
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Meeting the Universe Halfway
Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning
Karen Barad
Duke University Press, 2006
Meeting the Universe Halfway is an ambitious book with far-reaching implications for numerous fields in the natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities. In this volume, Karen Barad, theoretical physicist and feminist theorist, elaborates her theory of agential realism. Offering an account of the world as a whole rather than as composed of separate natural and social realms, agential realism is at once a new epistemology, ontology, and ethics. The starting point for Barad’s analysis is the philosophical framework of quantum physicist Niels Bohr. Barad extends and partially revises Bohr’s philosophical views in light of current scholarship in physics, science studies, and the philosophy of science as well as feminist, poststructuralist, and other critical social theories. In the process, she significantly reworks understandings of space, time, matter, causality, agency, subjectivity, and objectivity.
In an agential realist account, the world is made of entanglements of “social” and “natural” agencies, where the distinction between the two emerges out of specific intra-actions. Intra-activity is an inexhaustible dynamism that configures and reconfigures relations of space-time-matter. In explaining intra-activity, Barad reveals questions about how nature and culture interact and change over time to be fundamentally misguided. And she reframes understanding of the nature of scientific and political practices and their “interrelationship.” Thus she pays particular attention to the responsible practice of science, and she emphasizes changes in the understanding of political practices, critically reworking Judith Butler’s influential theory of performativity. Finally, Barad uses agential realism to produce a new interpretation of quantum physics, demonstrating that agential realism is more than a means of reflecting on science; it can be used to actually do science.
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Mind, Matter, and Method
Essays in Philosophy and Science in Honor of Herbert Feigl
Paul K. Feyerabend and Grover Maxwell, Editors
University of Minnesota Press, 1966
Mind, Matter, and Method was first published in 1966. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.
This volume of twenty-six essays by as many contributors is published in honor of Herbert Feigl, professor of philosophy at the University of Minnesota and director of the Minnesota Center for the Philosophy of Science. Though the majority of the contributors are philosophers, there are also -- as benefits Mr. Feigl's varied intellectual interests -- representatives of psychology, psychoanalysis, and physics.
The first group of ten essays deals with the philosophy of mind, particularly with the mind-body problem, to which Mr. Feigl has devoted much attention. The eleven essays in the second part are concerned with problems of philosophical method, especially with induction and confirmation. The third part is comprised of five essays on the philosophy of the physical sciences. A biographical sketch of Mr. Feigl and a bibliography of his writings are also provided.
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Mind, Matter, and Nature
James D. Madden
Catholic University of America Press, 2013
Written for students, Mind, Matter, and Nature presumes no prior philosophical training on the part of the reader. The book nevertheless holds the arguments discussed to rigorous standards and is conversant with recent literature, thus making it useful as well to more advanced students and professionals interested in a resource on Thomistic hylomorphism in the philosophy of mind.
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Nothing Wanting
Asexuality and the Matter of Absence
KJ Cerankowski
University of Minnesota Press, 2025
Advancing asexuality studies in new, queer directions—beyond identity and beyond the human
We’ve all seen the page that states “this page intentionally left blank” or heard an authority figure declare “nothing to see here, folks,” and yet the so-called blank page has writing on it, and folks definitely have something to see. From the entry point of these and other paradoxical declarations of absence, KJ Cerankowski applies the aesthetics of asexuality to theorize silences, nothings, and emptiness. In the process, he explores new ways of making meaning out of the supposedly meaningless.
Throughout this investigation into absences, Cerankowski moves intuitively and idiosyncratically, taking readers along a series of waypoints that include Border, the acclaimed horror film about a customs officer who can smell fear; Jenny Hval’s discomfiting novel Paradise Rot; and disabled artist Finnegan Shannon’s iconic benches. Experimental in form as well as content, Nothing Wanting offers an innovative and mischievous reading experience that plays with structural elements like redaction, erasure, supertext, and repetition. With a deeply anticapitalist, anticolonial motivating ideology, it pushes to the limits of language, subverting commonplace notions of books, knowledge, and what it is to be human.
Moving beyond identity and representation, Nothing Wanting is playful, fascinating, and provocative as it conceives asexuality as additive and expansive rather than lacking. As it reveals the vibrant lifeworlds that hum in silences and thrum in stillnesses, Nothing Wanting pivots from the imposition of wanting nothing to the craving of nothing wanting: satisfied, yet always yearning for more worlds of thriving—for everything and everyone.
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Plotinus Ennead II.4
On Matter: Translation with an Introduction and Commentary
A.A. Long
Parmenides Publishing, 2022
In Ennead II.4 Plotinus investigates the question of what underlies the forms that constitute the contents of our minds and senses. Aristotle had called this substrate “matter,” and Stoic philosophers followed suit. With a critical review of their notions, and reference to Plato’s so-called Receptacle, Plotinus develops an account of matter that makes it a supremely negative entity. How he describes the indescribable, and how he justifies incorporeal matter’s indispensability to bodies, are highlights of this tenaciously argued essay.
A. A. Long translates and interprets Plotinus’ treatise on the matter that underlies all physical and intelligible beings. With a wide-ranging introduction and probing analysis of details, he explains the intricate structure of the text. The book will appeal to everyone interested in the history of Platonism and ancient Greek theories of the world’s ultimate principles.
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Reckoning with Matter
Calculating Machines, Innovation, and Thinking about Thinking from Pascal to Babbage
Matthew L. Jones
University of Chicago Press, 2016
From Blaise Pascal in the 1600s to Charles Babbage in the first half of the nineteenth century, inventors struggled to create the first calculating machines. All failed—but that does not mean we cannot learn from the trail of ideas, correspondence, machines, and arguments they left behind.
In Reckoning with Matter, Matthew L. Jones draws on the remarkably extensive and well-preserved records of the quest to explore the concrete processes involved in imagining, elaborating, testing, and building calculating machines. He explores the writings of philosophers, engineers, and craftspeople, showing how they thought about technical novelty, their distinctive areas of expertise, and ways they could coordinate their efforts. In doing so, Jones argues that the conceptions of creativity and making they exhibited are often more incisive—and more honest—than those that dominate our current legal, political, and aesthetic culture.
In Reckoning with Matter, Matthew L. Jones draws on the remarkably extensive and well-preserved records of the quest to explore the concrete processes involved in imagining, elaborating, testing, and building calculating machines. He explores the writings of philosophers, engineers, and craftspeople, showing how they thought about technical novelty, their distinctive areas of expertise, and ways they could coordinate their efforts. In doing so, Jones argues that the conceptions of creativity and making they exhibited are often more incisive—and more honest—than those that dominate our current legal, political, and aesthetic culture.
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Rite, Flesh, and Stone
The Matter of Death in Contemporary Spanish Culture
Antonio Córdoba
Vanderbilt University Press, 2021
Forensic science provides information and data behind the circumstances of a particular death, but it is culture that provides death with meaning. With this in mind, Rite, Flesh, and Stone proposes cultural matters of death as its structuring principle, operating as frames of the expression of mortality within a distinct set of coordinates. The chapters offer original approaches to how human remains are handled in the embodied rituals and social performances of contemporary funeral rites of all kinds; furthermore, they explore how dying flesh and corpses are processed by means of biopolitical technologies and the ethics of (self-)care, and how the vibrant and breathing materiality of the living is transformed into stone and analogous kinds of tangible, empirical presence that engender new cartographies of memory. Each coming from a specific disciplinary perspective, authors in this volume problematize conventional ideas about the place of death in contemporary Western societies and cultures using Spain as a case study.
Materials analyzed here—ranging from cinematic and literary fictions, to historical archives and anthropological and ethnographic sources—make explicit a dynamic scenario where actors embody a variety of positions toward death and dying, the political production of mortality, and the commemoration of the dead. Ultimately, the goal of this volume is to chart the complex network in which the disenchantment of death and its reenchantment coexist, and biopolitical control over secularized bodies overlaps with new avatars of the religious and non-theistic desires for memorialization and transcendence.
Materials analyzed here—ranging from cinematic and literary fictions, to historical archives and anthropological and ethnographic sources—make explicit a dynamic scenario where actors embody a variety of positions toward death and dying, the political production of mortality, and the commemoration of the dead. Ultimately, the goal of this volume is to chart the complex network in which the disenchantment of death and its reenchantment coexist, and biopolitical control over secularized bodies overlaps with new avatars of the religious and non-theistic desires for memorialization and transcendence.
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Shreds of Matter
Cormac McCarthy and the Concept of Nature
Julius Greve
Dartmouth College Press, 2018
Shreds of Matter: Cormac McCarthy and the Concept of Nature offers a nuanced and innovative take on McCarthy’s ostensible localism and, along with it, the ecocentric perspective on the world that is assumed by most critics. In opposing the standard interpretations of McCarthy’s novels as critical either of persisting American ideologies—such as manifest destiny and imperialism—or of the ways in which humanity has laid waste to planet Earth, Greve instead emphasizes the author’s interest both in the history of science and in the mythographical developments of religious discourse. Greve aims to counter traditional interpretations of McCarthy’s work and at the same time acknowledge their partial truth, taking into account the work of Friedrich W. J. Schelling and Lorenz Oken, contemporary speculative realism, and Bertrand Westphal’s geocriticism. Further, newly discovered archival material sheds light on McCarthy’s immersion in the metaphysical question par excellence: What is nature?
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Synthesizing Hope
Matter, Knowledge, and Place in South African Drug Discovery
Anne Pollock
University of Chicago Press, 2019
Synthesizing Hope opens up the material and social world of pharmaceuticals by focusing on an unexpected place: iThemba Pharmaceuticals. Founded in 2009 with a name taken from the Zulu word for hope, the small South African startup with an elite international scientific board was tasked with drug discovery for tuberculosis, HIV, and malaria. Anne Pollock uses this company as an entry point for exploring how the location of scientific knowledge production matters, not only for the raw materials, manufacture, licensing, and distribution of pharmaceuticals but also for the making of basic scientific knowledge.
Consideration of this case exposes the limitations of global health frameworks that implicitly posit rich countries as the only sites of knowledge production. Analysis of iThemba identifies the problems inherent in global north/south divides at the same time as it highlights what is at stake in who makes knowledge and where. It also provides a concrete example for consideration of the contexts and practices of postcolonial science, its constraints, and its promise.
Synthesizing Hope explores the many legacies that create conditions of possibility for South African drug discovery, especially the specific form of settler colonialism characterized by apartheid and resource extraction. Paying attention to the infrastructures and laboratory processes of drug discovery underscores the materiality of pharmaceuticals from the perspective of their makers, and tracing the intellectual and material infrastructures of South African drug discovery contributes new insights about larger social, political, and economic orders.
Consideration of this case exposes the limitations of global health frameworks that implicitly posit rich countries as the only sites of knowledge production. Analysis of iThemba identifies the problems inherent in global north/south divides at the same time as it highlights what is at stake in who makes knowledge and where. It also provides a concrete example for consideration of the contexts and practices of postcolonial science, its constraints, and its promise.
Synthesizing Hope explores the many legacies that create conditions of possibility for South African drug discovery, especially the specific form of settler colonialism characterized by apartheid and resource extraction. Paying attention to the infrastructures and laboratory processes of drug discovery underscores the materiality of pharmaceuticals from the perspective of their makers, and tracing the intellectual and material infrastructures of South African drug discovery contributes new insights about larger social, political, and economic orders.
[more]
What’s the Matter with the Internet?
Mark Poster
University of Minnesota Press, 2001
A provocative investigation into the social and cultural implications of the Internet by a leading cultural critic.
As the Internet has become more and more a part of our daily lives, responses to its impact on culture and society have tended toward the extremes, hopeful or pessimistic. Fears that the Internet undermines community, inhibits social interaction, exacerbates economic and racial divisions, and facilitates greater state or corporate intrusion into our lives are balanced by excitement about the transformative qualities of the new medium and its potential to stimulate individual creativity, inspire new social forms, and further democratization.
In What’s the Matter with the Internet?, leading cultural theorist Mark Poster offers a sophisticated and astute assessment of the potential the new medium has to redefine culture and politics. Avoiding the mindless hype and meaningless jargon that has characterized much of the debate about the future of the Web, he details what truly distinguishes the Internet from other media and the implications these novel properties have for such vital issues as authorship, national identity and global citizenship, the fate of ethnicity and race, and democracy. Arguing that the Internet demands a social and cultural theory appropriate to the specific qualities of cyberspace, Poster reformulates the ideas of thinkers associated with our understanding of postmodern culture and the media (including Foucault, Deleuze, Heidegger, Baudrillard, and Derrida) to account for and illuminate the virtual world, paying particular attention to its political dimensions and the nature of identity. In this innovative analysis, Poster acknowledges that although the colonization of the Internet by corporations and governments does threaten to retard its capacity to bring about genuine change, the new medium is still capable of transforming both contemporary social practices and the way we see the world and ourselves.[more]
Worlds Beyond Bios
The Life of Matter and the Matter of Life
Sophie Chao, Christine J. Winter, and David Schlosberg, editors
Duke University Press, 2026
Worlds Beyond Bios builds on recent theoretical and ethnographic approaches to the more-than-human, exploring how entities not traditionally recognized as “alive” play active roles in shaping multispecies worlds. Drawing from Indigenous and Global South epistemologies as well as anthropology, the environmental humanities, and political theory, the contributors develop philosophies and practices of engagement with matter that are agentive and affective. Taken together, they offer ways of theorizing relations, justice, and materiality in an age of planetary unmaking and colonial capitalist logics, grounded in an ethics of responsibility and repair. From the political agency of mountains and the liveliness of sand to the spectral futures of coal and the opaque aesthetics of dust, Worlds Beyond Bios reveals how assumed borders between bios and non-bios are not only porous but politically consequential.
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