BiblioVault - Books about Rees, Amanda

Human

Amanda Rees and Charlotte Sleigh

Reaktion Books, 2020

What does it mean to be human? And what, if anything, does it have to do with being a member of the animal species Homo sapiens? This dazzling book gets to the very heart of our rather unscientific motivations and prejudices, showing how they are of great use in resolving the world’s biggest problems. From beasts to aliens, this book explores widely discussed but often problematic links between humans and six other beings, tackling deep philosophical questions including humanity’s common purpose, life’s meaning, and what it means to be accepted as part of a community. Global in its outlook and illustrated with stunning pictures, Human is a powerful, funny, and iconoclastic antidote to post-humanism.

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The Infanticide Controversy

Primatology and the Art of Field Science

Amanda Rees

University of Chicago Press, 2009

Infanticide in the natural world might be a relatively rare event, but as Amanda Rees shows, it has enormously significant consequences. Identified in the 1960s as a phenomenon worthy of investigation, infanticide had, by the 1970s, become the focus of serious controversy. The suggestion, by Sarah Hrdy, that it might be the outcome of an evolved strategy intended to maximize an individual’s reproductive success sparked furious disputes between scientists, disagreements that have continued down to the present day.

Meticulously tracing the history of the infanticide debates, and drawing on extensive interviews with field scientists, Rees investigates key theoretical and methodological themes that have characterized field studies of apes and monkeys in the twentieth century. As a detailed study of the scientific method and its application to field research, The Infanticide Controversy sheds new light on our understanding of scientific practice, focusing in particular on the challenges of working in “natural” environments, the relationship between objectivity and interpretation in an observational science, and the impact of the public profile of primatology on the development of primatological research. Most importantly, it also considers the wider significance that the study of field science has in a period when the ecological results of uncontrolled human interventions in natural systems are becoming ever more evident.

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Osiris, Volume 34

Presenting Futures Past: Science Fiction and the History of Science

Edited by Amanda Rees and Iwan Rhys Morus

University of Chicago Press Journals, 2019

The role of fiction in both understanding and interpreting the world has recently become an increasingly important topic for many of the human sciences. This volume of Osiris focuses on the relationship between a particular genre of storytelling—science fiction (SF), told through a variety of media—and the history of science.

The protagonists of these two enterprises have a lot in common. Both SF and the history of science are oriented towards the (re)construction of unfamiliar worlds; both are fascinated by the ways in which natural and social systems interact; both are critically aware of the different ways in which the social (class, gender, race, sex, species) has inflected the experience of the scientific. Taking a global approach, Presenting Futures Past examines the ways in which SF can be used to investigate the cultural status and authority afforded to science at different times and in different places. The essays consider the role played by SF in the history of specific scientific disciplines, topics, or cultures, as well as the ways in which it has helped to move scientific concepts, methodologies, and practices between wider cultural areas. Ultimately, Presenting Futures Past explores what SF can tell us about the histories of the future, how different communities have envisaged their futures, and how SF conveys the socioscientific claims of past presents.

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Theatre Symposium, Vol. 23

Theatre and Youth

David S. Thompson

University of Alabama Press, 2015

The curtain rises on Theatre and Youth, volume 23 of Theatre Symposium with keynote reflections by Suzan Zeder, the distinguished playwright of theatre for youth, and presents eleven original essays about theatre’s reflections of youth and the role of young people in making and performing theatre.

The first set of essays draws from robustly diverse sources: the work of Frank Wedekind in nineteenth-century Germany, Peter Pan’s several stage incarnations, Evgeny Shvarts’s antitotalitarian plays in Soviet Russia, and Christopher Marlowe’s Dido, Queen of Carthage, whose depictions of childhood comment on both the classical period as well as Marlowe’s own Elizabethan age.

The second part of the collection explores and illustrates how youth participate in theatre, the cognitive benefits youth reap from theatre practice, and the ameliorating power of theatre to help at-risk youth. These essays show fascinating and valuable case studies of, for example, theatre employed in geography curricula to strengthen spatial thinking, theatre as an antidote to youth delinquency, and theatre teaching Latinos in the south strategies for coping in a multilingual world.

Rounding out this exemplary collection are a pair of essays that survey the state of the art, the significance of theatre-for-youth programming choices, and the shifting attitudes young Americans are bringing to the discipline. Eclectic and vital, this expertly curated collection will be of interest to educators and theatre professionals alike.

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