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75 books match the query 'Construction' and 11 start with b

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Bargaining for Reality

The Construction of Social Relations in a Muslim Community

Lawrence Rosen

University of Chicago Press, 1984

Much modern anthropology has assumed that an adequate description of any society consists of rules that inform its members' relationships and the logic that unites their cultural symbols. In this book Lawrence Rosen argues that, for the people who live in and around the Moroccan city of Sefrou, attachment to others and the terms by which they are conceived are, at their most fundamental level, subject to a constant process of negotiation.

Drawing on the philosophy of speech acts as well as interpretive theory, Rosen shows how, for the people of this Muslim community, reality consists of the network of obligations formed by individuals out of a repertoire of relational possibilities whose defining terms are comprised by a set of essentially negotiable concepts. He thus demonstrates that the bonds of family, tribe, and political alliance take shape only as the bargains struck in and through the malleable terms that describe them take shape; that statements about relationship are no more true than a price mentioned in the marketplace until properly validated; that the relations between men and women, Arabs and Berbers, Muslims and Jews test the limits of interpersonal negotiation; and that the concepts of time, character, and narrative style are consonant with a view of reality as bargained-for network of obligations.

Bargaining for Reality makes an important contribution to our understanding of contemporary Middle Eastern society and to the development of powerful new interpretive strategies for a wide range of social theorists.

"[Rosen's] book is extremely useful for African and Middle Eastern historians, because he challenges some of our most basic ideas about the nature and force of kinship, tribe, ethnicity, and other large- and small-scale political ties."—Allan R. Meyers, International Journal of African Historical Studies

"The book conveys a compelling image of Moroccan social experience and is peppered with vivid anecdotes and case histories."—Stephen William Foster, American Anthropologist

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Bio-Imperialism

Disease, Terror, and the Construction of National Fragility

Gwen Shuni D'Arcangelis

Rutgers University Press, 2021

Bio-Imperialism focuses on an understudied dimension of the war on terror: the fight against bioterrorism. This component of the war enlisted the biosciences and public health fields to build up the U.S. biodefense industry and U.S. global disease control. The book argues that U.S. imperial ambitions drove these shifts in focus, aided by gendered and racialized discourses on terrorism, disease, and science. These narratives helped rationalize American research expansion into dangerous germs and bioweapons in the name of biodefense and bolstered the U.S. rationale for increased interference in the disease control decisions of Global South nations. Bio-Imperialism is a sobering look at how the war on terror impacted the world in ways that we are only just starting to grapple with.

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Blockchain, Smart Contracts and Distributed Ledger Technologies in the Built Environment

Key concepts, technologies, and applications

Mohamad Kassem

The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 2025

The built environment, encompassing the spaces we inhabit, the infrastructure that connects us, and the systems that sustain our societies, is foundational to human progress. It shapes how we live, work and interact, serving as a fundamental for social and economic prosperity. Yet, despite its importance, the sector faces enduring challenges: inefficiencies, insufficient collaboration, significant environmental impact, and a slow pace of transformative innovation, particularly in areas such as value creation, business model evolution, and major sector-wide transformations.

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Border Land, Border Water

A History of Construction on the US-Mexico Divide

By C. J. Alvarez

University of Texas Press, 2019

Winner, Abbott Lowell Cummings Award, Vernacular Architecture Forum, 2020
Winner, Elisabeth Blair MacDougall Book Award, Society of Architectural Historians, 2021

From the boundary surveys of the 1850s to the ever-expanding fences and highway networks of the twenty-first century, Border Land, Border Water examines the history of the construction projects that have shaped the region where the United States and Mexico meet.

Tracing the accretion of ports of entry, boundary markers, transportation networks, fences and barriers, surveillance infrastructure, and dams and other river engineering projects, C. J. Alvarez advances a broad chronological narrative that captures the full life cycle of border building. He explains how initial groundbreaking in the nineteenth century transitioned to unbridled faith in the capacity to control the movement of people, goods, and water through the use of physical structures. By the 1960s, however, the built environment of the border began to display increasingly obvious systemic flaws. More often than not, Alvarez shows, federal agencies in both countries responded with more construction—“compensatory building” designed to mitigate unsustainable policies relating to immigration, black markets, and the natural world. Border Land, Border Water reframes our understanding of how the border has come to look and function as it does and is essential to current debates about the future of the US-Mexico divide.

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Build With Adobe

Marcia Southwick

Ohio University Press, 1974

This practical guide to building adobe homes was written from the author's many years of experience with adobe, and it is refreshingly no-nonsense:

“What can you spend?”
“Where will you put it?”
“Who is going to build it?”

This new updated and enlarged edition includes hundreds of photographs, drawings and house plans as well as new information about passive solar heating and cooling, and specific details on construction.

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Building Materials and Technology in Hong Kong, Expanded Second Edition

Wah Sang Wong, Wing Yan, Alice Chan, Chui Chi, Rosman Wai, Yee Chun, Tris Kee, Kam Lung, Franky Choi, Jingxuan, and Lila Xie

Hong Kong University Press, 2026

This book is a thorough documentation of tectonics in the Hong Kong construction industry. It looks at how buildings have been designed and built in a high-density city in a subtropical climate. Written in both Chinese and English, it covers almost all aspects of building materials and technology in Hong Kong with a succinct sequence that follows the construction process of a building project. The case studies in Chapter 3 brings together 16 local projects, which embrace a wide range of building types: from single-storey buildings to high-rise towers, from private development to public institutional construction, from office to residence, and provide invaluable information on the application of building materials and technology.

While it is intended primarily for students in architecture, surveying, and construction, Building Materials and Technology in Hong Kong is an indispensable reference for professionals and practitioners who are dealing with building design and construction. Those with a general interest in building construction will also find this highly illustrated book an interesting and engaging read.

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Building Momentum

A Decade of Construction, Renovation, and Renewal across the University of Illinois System

University of Illinois. Foreword by Timothy L. Killeen

University of Illinois Press, 2023

A detailed look at the expansion and renewal taking place on the three U of I campuses

The University of Illinois System’s universities have undergone a dramatic transformation. This lavishly illustrated volume showcases the major capital projects and renovations dedicated to keeping facilities on the cutting edge while at the same time preserving history at the universities in Urbana-Champaign, Chicago, and Springfield. Fueled by an ambitious capital initiative launched in 2018, these essential and forward-looking changes include more than 500 projects valued at $4 billion over 10 years. The initiative harnesses a mix of innovative funding programs like public-private partnerships, thoughtful use of capital reserves and bonding authority, and generous state funding.

Covering completed and ongoing projects, Building Momentum offers a one- or two-page feature on each undertaking that covers its history and purpose while providing specific details about its unit, campus, architect, square footage or renovation size, budget, and LEED or other certifications. More than 100 architectural drawings and commissioned and historical photographs round out the descriptions.

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Building New Banjos for an Old-Time World

Richard Jones-Bamman

University of Illinois Press, 2017

Banjo music possesses a unique power to evoke a bucolic, simpler past. The artisans who build banjos for old-time music stand at an unusual crossroads ”asked to meet the modern musician's needs while retaining the nostalgic qualities so fundamental to the banjo's sound and mystique. Richard Jones-Bamman ventures into workshops and old-time music communities to explore how banjo builders practice their art. His interviews and long-time personal immersion in the musical culture shed light on long-overlooked aspects of banjo making. What is the banjo builder's role in the creation of a specific musical community? What techniques go into the styles of instruments they create? Jones-Bamman explores these questions and many others while sharing the ways an inescapable sense of the past undergirds the performance and enjoyment of old-time music. Along the way he reveals how antimodernism remains integral to the music's appeal and its making.

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Building a Nation

Chickasaw Museums and the Construction of History and Heritage

Joshua M. Gorman

University of Alabama Press, 2011

A groundbreaking study of Indigenous museums and cultural self-representation.

The Chickasaw Nation, an American Indian nation headquartered in southeastern Oklahoma, entered into a period of substantial growth in the late 1980s. Following its successful reorganization and expansion, which was enabled by federal policies for tribal self-determination, the Nation pursued gaming and other industries to affect economic growth. From 1987 to 2009 the Nation’s budget increased exponentially as tribal investments produced increasingly large revenues for a growing Chickasaw population. Coincident to this growth, the Chickasaw Nation began acquiring and creating museums and heritage properties to interpret their own history, heritage, and culture through diverse exhibitionary representations. By 2009, the Chickasaw Nation directed representation of itself at five museum and heritage properties throughout its historic boundaries.

Josh Gorman examines the history of these sites and argues that the Chickasaw Nation is using museums and heritage sites as places to define itself as a coherent and legitimate contemporary Indian nation. In doing so, they are necessarily engaging with the shifting historiographical paradigms as well as changing articulations of how museums function and what they represent. The roles of the Chickasaw Nation’s museums and heritage sites in defining and creating discursive representations of sovereignty are examined within their historicized local contexts. The work describes the museum exhibitions’ dialogue with the historiography of the Chickasaw Nation, the literature of new museum studies, and the indigenous exhibitionary grammars emerging from indigenous museums throughout the United States and the world.

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