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1441 books match the query 'World' and 54 start with d

cover of Documenting the World: Film, Photography, and the Scientific Record

Documenting the World

Film, Photography, and the Scientific Record

Edited by Gregg Mitman and Kelley Wilder

University of Chicago Press, 2016

Imagine the twentieth century without photography and film. Its history would be absent of images that define historical moments and generations: the death camps of Auschwitz, the assassination of John F. Kennedy, the Apollo lunar landing. It would be a history, in other words, of just artists’ renderings and the spoken and written word. To inhabitants of the twenty-first century, deeply immersed in visual culture, such a history seems insubstantial, imprecise, and even, perhaps, unscientific.

Documenting the World is about the material and social life of photographs and film made in the scientific quest to document the world. Drawing on scholars from the fields of art history, visual anthropology, and science and technology studies, the chapters in this book explore how this documentation—from the initial recording of images, to their acquisition and storage, to their circulation—has altered our lives, our ways of knowing, our social and economic relationships, and even our surroundings. Far beyond mere illustration, photography and film have become an integral, transformative part of the world they seek to show us.
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cover of Domestic Perspectives on Contemporary Democracy

Domestic Perspectives on Contemporary Democracy

Edited by Peter F. Nardulli

University of Illinois Press, 2007

In looking at the remarkable proliferation of democracies since 1974, this volume offers important insight into the challenges and opportunities that democracy faces in the twenty-first century. Distinguished contributors detail difficulties that democracies face from within and how they deal with them. Among the contemporary threats to democracy emanating from internal sources are tensions arising over technology and its uses; ethnic, religious, and racial distinctions; and disparate access to resources, education, and employment. A democratically elected government can behave more or less democratically, even when controlling access to information, using legal authority to aid or intimidate, and applying resources to shape the conditions for the next election. With elections recently disputed in the United States, Mexico, Lebanon, and the Ukraine, debates about the future of democracy are inescapably debates about what kind of democracy is desired.

Contributors are W. Lance Bennett, Bruce Bimber, Jon Fraenkel, Brian J. Gaines, Bernard Grofman, Wayne V. McIntosh, Peter F. Nardulli, Mark Q. Sawyer, Stephen Simon, Paul M. Sniderman, and Jack Snyder.

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cover of Domesticating Democracy: The Politics of Conflict Resolution in Bolivia

Domesticating Democracy

The Politics of Conflict Resolution in Bolivia

Susan Helen Ellison

Duke University Press, 2018

In Domesticating Democracy Susan Helen Ellison examines foreign-funded alternate dispute resolution (ADR) organizations that provide legal aid and conflict resolution to vulnerable citizens in El Alto, Bolivia. Advocates argue that these programs help residents cope with their interpersonal disputes and economic troubles while avoiding an overburdened legal system and cumbersome state bureaucracies. Ellison shows that ADR programs do more than that—they aim to change the ways Bolivians interact with the state and with global capitalism, making them into self-reliant citizens. ADR programs frequently encourage Bolivians to renounce confrontational expressions of discontent, turning away from courtrooms, physical violence, and street protest and coming to the negotiation table. Nevertheless, residents of El Alto find creative ways to take advantage of these micro-level resources while still seeking justice and a democratic system capable of redressing the structural violence and vulnerability that ADR fails to treat.
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cover of Drama of Democracy: Political Representation in Mumbai

Drama of Democracy

Political Representation in Mumbai

Lisa Björkman

University of Minnesota Press, 2025

The performative arts of political communication and representation in Mumbai


In an era of global political passions, many have wondered whether some sort of natural affinity exists between political style and substance. Does liberal democracy speak the language of rationality and sincerity while political emotion, imagery, and embodiment properly belong to authoritarianism? Taking an ethnographic approach to the relationship between political form and political content, Drama of Democracy explores the material substance of representations (things like heady crowds and rousing images) together with language-based forms of political communication, such as public oration and community meetings.

 

Drawing on a decade of research in the city of Mumbai, Lisa Björkman shows that embodied performance is the very site and substance of representation and demonstrates how Mumbaikars evaluate performative bids to represent. The ethnographic accounts demonstrate the extraordinary fluency in this evaluative work in Mumbai, where people from all walks of life are remarkably astute at navigating and assessing political signs and representations, endlessly discussing and debating possible meanings of the city’s dense material-semiotic ecologies—whether words or images, cash or crowds, flyers or flowers.

 

In Mumbai, Björkman argues, the evaluative criterion of representation is not whether something is sign or substance, or even whether people are deemed to utter truths or falsehoods. Rather, what matters is whether and how a performance activates and actuates the social relations and political subjectivities that it professes to display. Drama of Democracy highlights Mumbaikars’ communicative fluency and theatrical acumen to offer a conceptual toolbox through which contemporary political churnings around the globe might be understood.

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