4127 books match the query 'Science' and 25 start with k

cover of Kaiaulu: Gathering Tides

Kaiaulu

Gathering Tides

Mehana Blaich Vaughan

Oregon State University Press, 2018

The tide is rising ahead of the early morning sun on the northeast coast of the Hawaiian island of Kaua‘i. Waves rush singing onto the outer reef where two throw net fishermen stalk the surge. An elderly woman with her silver hair in a kerchief makes her way toward shore, two octopuses tucked in her mesh bag. Within hours, two hundred tourists will snorkel, sunbathe, and teeter on the coral, few ever knowing that people fish here or that their catch sustains an entire kaiāulu (community) connected to this stretch of reef.

This coast is known as a playground for tourists and backdrop for Hollywood movies, but catch from small local reefs, and the sharing of this abundance, has sustained area families for centuries, helping them to thrive through tidal waves, hurricanes, an influx of new residents, and economic recessions. Yet fishing families are increasingly invisible and many have moved away, threatened by global commodification and loss of access to coastal lands that are now private retreats for star entertainers, investors, and dot-com millionaires.

Building on two decades of interviews with more than sixty Hawaiian elders, leaders, and fishermen and women, Kaiāulu shares their stories of enduring community efforts to perpetuate kuleana, often translated to mean “rights and responsibilities.” Community actions extend kuleana to include nurturing respectful relationships with resources, guarding and cultivating fishing spots, perpetuating collective harvests and sharing, maintaining connection to family lands, reasserting local governance rooted in ancestral values, and preparing future generations to carry on.

An important contribution to scholarship in the fields of natural resource management, geography, Indigenous Studies, and Hawaiian Studies, Kaiāulu is also a skillfully written and deeply personal tribute to a community based not on ownership, but reciprocity, responsibility, and caring for the places that shape and sustain us all.
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cover of Kanaka Hawai'i Cartography: Hula, Navigation, and Oratory

Kanaka Hawai'i Cartography

Hula, Navigation, and Oratory

Renee Pualani Louis

Oregon State University Press, 2017

Hawai'ian performance cartography is an interactive presentation of place as ‘experienced space’ that situates mapping in the environment, and encodes spatial knowledge into bodily memory via repetitive recitations and other habitual practices.
 
An important symbolic element in Hawai'ian cartography is the storied place name, which reflects Hawai'ian spatial knowledge of the environment. Many Hawai'ian place names performed in daily rituals were a conscious act of locating genealogical connections, recreating cultural landscapes, and regenerating cultural mores. They constitute a critically important body of Hawai'ian cultural knowledge. When Hawai'ian place names were incorporated into Western cartographic maps they were transformed epistemologically. They went from representing place as a repository of cultural knowledge to representing place as an object on the landscape. Hawai'ian spatial knowledge presentation is interactive, multi-sensual, and multi‐ dimensional.
 
Kanaka Hawai'i Cartography interweaves methodology with personal narrative and performance presentation in a playbill format. Three of the seven chapters are presented as “Acts” in a play. The remaining four chapters serve as intermissions or interludes together with a prologue and an epilogue for setting the stage and providing closure. To help make the topic more accessible, complex terms have been minimized, making academic theory easier for the educated reader to understand. The book will fill an important gap in Indigenous and Native Studies and will be welcomed by anyone interested in traditional Hawai’ian performance cartography.
 
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cover of Kandik Map

Kandik Map

Linda Johnson

University of Alaska Press, 2009

In 1880, a Native American named Paul Kandik and a French explorer, François Mercier, traveled across northeastern Alaska and western Canada to create the earliest known map of the region. Linda Johnson now delves into the fascinating story behind the Kandik Map, examining the reasons why and how these two men from such different backgrounds combined their extensive knowledge of the country to map the Kandik River region. Drawing on historical letters, geographical analysis, and the original map itself held in the University of California’s Bancroft Library, Johnson produces a groundbreaking study on the history of the Kandik Map and reveals its significant implications for Native American scholarship.
 
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cover of Kant's Organicism: Epigenesis and the Development of Critical Philosophy

Kant's Organicism

Epigenesis and the Development of Critical Philosophy

Jennifer Mensch

University of Chicago Press, 2013

Because it laid the foundation for nearly all subsequent epistemologies, Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason has overshadowed his other interests in natural history and the life sciences, which scholars have long considered as separate from his rigorous theoretical philosophy—until now. In Kant’s Organicism, Jennifer Mensch draws a crucial link between these spheres by showing how the concept of epigenesis—a radical theory of biological formation—lies at the heart of Kant’s conception of reason.
 
As Mensch argues, epigenesis was not simply a metaphor for Kant but centrally guided his critical philosophy, especially the relationship between reason and the categories of the understanding. Offsetting a study of Kant’s highly technical theory of cognition with a mixture of intellectual history and biography, she situates the epigenesis of reason within broader investigations into theories of generation, genealogy, and classification, and against later writers and thinkers such as Goethe and Darwin. Distilling vast amounts of research on the scientific literature of the time into a concise and readable book, Mensch offers one of the most refreshing looks not only at Kant’s famous first Critique but at the history of philosophy and the life sciences as well.
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cover of Kaon Physics

Kaon Physics

Edited by Jonathan L. Rosner and Bruce D. Winstein

University of Chicago Press, 2001

In 1947, the first of what have come to be known as "strange particles" were detected. As the number and variety of these particles proliferated, physicists began to try to make sense of them. Some seemed to have masses about 900 times that of the electron, and existed in both charged and neutral varieties. These particles are now called kaons (or K mesons), and they have become the subject of some of the most exciting research in particle physics. Kaon Physics at the Turn of the Millennium presents cutting-edge papers by leading theorists and experimentalists that synthesize the current state of the field and suggest promising new directions for the future study of kaons.

Topics covered include the history of kaon physics, direct CP violation in kaon decays, time reversal violation, CPT studies, theoretical aspects of kaon physics, rare kaon decays, hyperon physics, charm: CP violation and mixing, the physics of B mesons, and future opportunities for kaon physics in the twenty-first century.
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cover of Karl Popper, Science and Enlightenment

Karl Popper, Science and Enlightenment

Nicholas Maxwell

University College London, 2017

Could science, if properly understood, provide us with the methodological key to the salvation of humanity? That is a chief question coursing through the works of Karl Popper, who famously maintained that science cannot verify theories but only refute them, thereby bringing about progress. Nicholas Maxwell’s new book disputes this line of argument. By proposing a new conception of scientific methodology on disunified theories—which can be applied to all worthwhile human endeavours with problematic aims—this book calls for a new revolution in inquiry to help humanity advance towards a more civilized and enlightened world. 
 
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cover of Keepers of the Wolves

Keepers of the Wolves

Richard P. Thiel

University of Wisconsin Press, 2018

It was 1978, and gray wolves had been extinct in Wisconsin for twenty years. Still, there were rumors from the state's northwestern counties that they had returned. Dick Thiel, then a college student with a passion for wolves, was determined to find out. Keepers of the Wolves is his engrossing account of tracking and protecting the recovery of wolves in Wisconsin. Thiel conveys the wonder, frustrations, humor, and everyday hard work of field biologists, including the political and public relations pitfalls they regularly face.

This new edition brings Thiel's story into the twenty-first century, recounting his work monitoring wolves as they spread to central Wisconsin, conflicts of wolves with landowners and recreationalists, changes in state and federal policies, the establishment of a state wolf-hunting season in 2012, and Thiel's forecast for the future of wolves in Wisconsin.
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cover of Keeping the World’s Environment under Review: An Intellectual History of the Global Environment Outlook

Keeping the World’s Environment under Review

An Intellectual History of the Global Environment Outlook

Jan Bakkes

Central European University Press, 2022

How do we take stock of the state and direction of the world’s environment, and what can we learn from the experience? Among the myriad detailed narratives about the condition of the planet, the Global Environment Outlook (GEO) reports—issued by the United Nations Environment Programme—stand out as the most ambitious. For nearly three decades the GEO project has not only delivered iconic global assessment reports, but through its multitude of contributors has inspired hundreds of similar processes worldwide from the regional to the local level.

This book provides an inside account of the evolution of the GEO project from its earliest days. Building on meticulous research, including interviews with former heads of the United Nations Environment Programme, diplomats, leading contributing scientists, and senior leaders of collaborating organizations, the story is told from the perspective of five GEO veterans who all played a pivotal role in shaping the periodic assessments. The GEO’s history provides striking insights and will save valuable time to those who commission, design and conduct, as well as critique and improve, assessments of environmental development in the next decade.

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cover of Kellogg on Biotechnology: Thriving through Integration

Kellogg on Biotechnology

Thriving through Integration

Alicia Loffler

Northwestern University Press, 2005

Biotechnology is the new capital. The stakeholders in this revolution are many: the scientists who generate the knowledge in fields where the pace is maddeningly fast; the technologists who make ideas a reality; the managers who struggle to deal with an industry where the old rules of thinking do not always apply; the venture capitalists who provide funds based on market moods rather than science; the health care, agricultural, chemical, and pharmaceutical industries whose once cozy enclaves have been revolutionized and are now barely recognizable; the law professionals and ethicists who have to grapple with issues unimaginable just a few years ago; the public policy makers who struggle with the complex issues and have to make decisions quickly, or risk being left behind; and, finally, the society and individuals who are in the midst of all that is taking place. This book addresses this diverse constituency and offers an integrated view of exciting new biotechnologies, both from a science and business perspective.

The book walks the reader through the "what"--what are some of the newest biotechnologies that will revolutionize the way we think about health?; the "how"--how to transform those technologies into profitable products and companies; and the "who"--who will benefit from these technologies?

Kellogg on Biotech is the outgrowth of a collaborative student-faculty effort called TechVentures at the Kellogg School of Management. Their research forms the raw material for Kellogg on Biotech.
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cover of Kepler's Geometrical Cosmology

Kepler's Geometrical Cosmology

J. V. Field

University of Chicago Press, 1987

The work of Johannes Kepler (1571-1630), regarded by many as the founder of modern astronomy, is also historically important to the philosophy and methodology of science as a whole. While most studies of Kepler have concentrated on his astronomical work, particularly his laws describing the revolutions of the planets, the. V. Field focuses on one of Kepler's major preoccupations, his search for the geometrical plan according to which God created teh universe. She demonstrates how Kepler's cosmological theories, which embrace music and astrology as well as astronomy, relate to his other work. Drawing on the whole body of Kepler's writings, Field traces the impact of Plato, Euclid, and Proclus on his thinking, as well as the influence of his contemporaries Galileo and Robert Fludd.

Kepler has suffered from a dual image as both hero of science and eccentric mystagogue. Field's sound scholarship provides a more complete picture of the man and his work that will be of value to historians of science, mathematics, philosophy, and the late Renaissance.
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cover of Keys to the Flora of Arkansas

Keys to the Flora of Arkansas

Edwin Smith

University of Arkansas Press, 1994

This comprehensive guide includes taxonomic keys to the families, genera, species, and infraspecific taxa of all the known vascular plants of Arkansas.
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cover of Killer Algae

Killer Algae

Alexandre Meinesz

University of Chicago Press, 1999

Two decades ago, a Stuttgart zoo imported a lush, bright green seaweed for its aquarium. Caulerpa taxifolia was captively bred by the zoo and exposed, for years, to chemicals and ultraviolet light. Eventually a sample of it found its way to the Oceanographic Museum in Monaco, then headed by Jacques Cousteau. Fifteen years ago, while cleaning its tanks, that museum dumped the pretty green plant into the Mediterranean.

This supposedly benign little plant—that no one thought could survive the waters of the Mediterranean—has now become a pernicious force. Caulerpa taxifolia now covers 10,000 acres of the coasts of France, Spain, Italy, and Croatia, and has devastated the Mediterranean ecosystem. And it continues to grow, unstoppable and toxic. When Alexandre Meinesz, a professor of biology at the University of Nice, discovered a square-yard patch of it in 1984, he warned biologists and oceanographers of the potential species invasion. His calls went unheeded. At that point, one person could have pulled the small patch out and ended the problem. Now, however, the plant has defeated the French Navy, thwarted scientific efforts to halt its rampage, and continues its destructive journey into the Adriatic Sea.

Killer Algae is the biological and political horror story of this invasion. For despite Meinesz's pleas to scientists and the French government, no agency was willing to take responsibility for the seaweed, and while the buck was passed, the killer algae grew. And through it all, the Oceanographic Museum in Monaco sought to exculpate itself. In short, Killer Algae—part detective story and part bureaucratic object lesson—is a classic case of a devastating ecological invasion and how not to deal with it.

"[U]tterly fascinating, not only because of the ecological battles [Meinesz] describes but also because of the wondrous natural phenomena involved."—Richard Bernstein, New York Times

"Akin to Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, Killer Algae shows the courage of a voice in the wilderness."—Choice

"A textbook case of how not to manage an environmental disaster."—Kirkus Reviews

"Meinesz's story is a frightening one, reading more like a science fiction thriller than a scientific account."—Publishers Weekly




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cover of Killing Time: The Autobiography of Paul Feyerabend

Killing Time

The Autobiography of Paul Feyerabend

Paul Feyerabend

University of Chicago Press, 1995

Killing Time is the story of Paul Feyerabend's life. Finished only weeks before his death in 1994, it is the self-portrait of one of this century's most original and influential intellectuals.

Trained in physics and astronomy, Feyerabend was best known as a philosopher of science. But he emphatically was not a builder of theories or a writer of rules. Rather, his fame was in powerful, plain-spoken critiques of "big" science and "big" philosophy. Feyerabend gave voice to a radically democratic "epistemological anarchism:" he argued forcefully that there is not one way to knowledge, but many principled paths; not one truth or one rationality but different, competing pictures of the workings of the world. "Anything goes," he said about the ways of science in his most famous book, Against Method. And he meant it.

Here, for the first time, Feyerabend traces the trajectory that led him from an isolated, lower-middle-class childhood in Vienna to the height of international academic success. He writes of his experience in the German army on the Russian front, where three bullets left him crippled, impotent, and in lifelong pain. He recalls his promising talent as an operatic tenor (a lifelong passion), his encounters with everyone from Martin Buber to Bertolt Brecht, innumerable love affairs, four marriages, and a career so rich he once held tenured positions at four universities at the same time.

Although not written as an intellectual autobiography, Killing Time sketches the people, ideas, and conflicts of sixty years. Feyerabend writes frankly of complicated relationships with his mentor Karl Popper and his friend and frequent opponent Imre Lakatos, and his reactions to a growing reputation as the "worst enemy of science."
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cover of Killing the Koala and Poisoning the Prairie: Australia, America, and the Environment

Killing the Koala and Poisoning the Prairie

Australia, America, and the Environment

Corey J. A. Bradshaw and Paul R. Ehrlich

University of Chicago Press, 2015

Though separated by thousands of miles, the United States and Australia have much in common. Geographically both countries are expansive—the United States is the fourth largest in land mass and Australia the sixth—and both possess a vast amount of natural biodiversity. At the same time, both nations are on a crash course toward environmental destruction. Highly developed super consumers with enormous energy footprints and high rates of greenhouse-gas emissions, they are two of the biggest drivers of climate change per capita. As renowned ecologists Corey J. A. Bradshaw and Paul R. Ehrlich make clear in Killing the Koala and Poisoning the Prairie, both of these countries must confront the urgent question of how to stem this devastation and turn back from the brink.
 
In this book, Bradshaw and Ehrlich provide a spirited exploration of the ways in which the United States and Australia can learn from their shared problems and combine their most successful solutions in order to find and develop new resources, lower energy consumption and waste, and grapple with the dynamic effects of climate change. Peppering the book with humor, irreverence, and extensive scientific knowledge, the authors examine how residents of both countries have irrevocably altered their natural environments, detailing the most pressing ecological issues of our time, including the continuing resource depletion caused by overpopulation. They then turn their discussion to the politics behind the failures of environmental policies in both nations and offer a blueprint for what must be dramatically changed to prevent worsening the environmental crisis.
 
Although focused on two nations, Killing the Koala and Poisoning the Prairie clearly has global implications—the problems facing the United States and Australia are not theirs alone, and the solutions to come will benefit by being crafted in coalition. This book provides a vital opportunity to learn from both countries’ leading environmental thinkers and to heed their call for a way forward together.
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cover of Knowing Global Environments: New Historical Perspectives on the Field Sciences

Knowing Global Environments

New Historical Perspectives on the Field Sciences

Vetter, Jeremy

Rutgers University Press, 2011

Knowing Global Environments brings together nine leading scholars whose work spans a variety of environmental and field sciences, including archaeology, agriculture, botany, climatology, ecology, evolutionary biology, oceanography, ornithology, and tidology.

Collectively their essays explore the history of the field sciences, through the lens of place, practice, and the production of scientific knowledge, with a wide-ranging perspective extending outwards from the local to regional, national, imperial, and global scales. The book also shows what the history of the field sciences can contribute to environmental history-especially how knowledge in the field sciences has intersected with changing environments-and addresses key present-day problems related to sustainability, such as global climate, biodiversity, oceans, and more.

Contributors to Knowing Global Environments reveal how the field sciences have interacted with practical economic activities, such as forestry, agriculture, and tourism, as well as how the public has been involved in the field sciences, as field assistants, students, and local collaborators.
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cover of Knowing Manchuria: Environments, the Senses, and Natural Knowledge on an Asian Borderland

Knowing Manchuria

Environments, the Senses, and Natural Knowledge on an Asian Borderland

Ruth Rogaski

University of Chicago Press, 2022

Making sense of nature in one of the world’s most contested borderlands.

According to Chinese government reports, hundreds of plague-infected rodents fell from the skies over Gannan county on an April night in 1952. Chinese scientists determined that these flying voles were not native to the region, but were vectors of germ warfare, dispatched over the border by agents of imperialism. Mastery of biology had become a way to claim political mastery over a remote frontier. Beginning with this bizarre incident from the Korean War, Knowing Manchuria places the creation of knowledge about nature at the center of our understanding of a little-known but historically important Asian landscape. 

At the intersection of China, Russia, Korea, and Mongolia, Manchuria is known as a site of war and environmental extremes, where projects of political control intersected with projects designed to make sense of Manchuria’s multiple environments. Covering more than 500,000 square miles, Manchuria’s landscapes include temperate rainforests, deserts, prairies, cultivated plains, wetlands, and Siberian taiga. With analysis spanning the seventeenth century to the present day, Ruth Rogaski reveals how an array of historical actors—Chinese poets, Manchu shamans, Russian botanists, Korean mathematicians, Japanese bacteriologists, American paleontologists, and indigenous hunters—made sense of the Manchurian frontier. She uncovers how natural knowledge, and thus the nature of Manchuria itself, changed over time, from a sacred “land where the dragon arose” to a global epicenter of contagious disease; from a tragic “wasteland” to an abundant granary that nurtured the hope of a nation.
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cover of Knowing Nature: Conversations at the Intersection of Political Ecology and Science Studies

Knowing Nature

Conversations at the Intersection of Political Ecology and Science Studies

Edited by Mara J. Goldman, Paul Nadasdy, and Matthew D. Turner

University of Chicago Press, 2011

Political ecology and science studies have found fertile meeting ground in environmental studies. While the two distinct areas of inquiry approach the environment from different perspectives—one focusing on the politics of resource access and the other on the construction and perception of knowledge—their work is actually more closely aligned now than ever before.

            
Knowing Nature brings together political ecologists and science studies scholars to showcase the key points of encounter between the two fields and how this intellectual mingling creates a lively and more robust ecological framework for the study of environmental politics. The contributors all actively work at the interface between these two fields, and here they use empirical material to explore questions of theoretical and practical import for understanding the politics that surround nature-society relations, from wildlife management in the Yukon to soil fertility in Kenya. In addition, they examine how various environmental knowledge claims are generated, packaged, promoted, and accepted (or rejected) by the different actors involved in specific cases of environmental management, conservation, and development. Finally, they ask what is at stake in the struggles surrounding environmental knowledge, how such struggles shape conceptions of the environment, and whose interests are served in the process.

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cover of Knowing Nukes: The Politics and Culture of the Atom

Knowing Nukes

The Politics and Culture of the Atom

William Chaloupka

University of Minnesota Press, 1992

Countering critics who charge that postmodern positions on language, authority, and power cannot inform effective political responses, this compelling analysis employs these same methods to examine antinuclear politics. Star Wars (the movie and the antimissile system), the Freeze movement, Reaganism, and “lifestyle” politics all receive new treatments.

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cover of Knowing and Being

Knowing and Being

Michael Polanyi

University of Chicago Press, 1973

Because of the difficulty posed by the contrast between the search for truth and truth itself, Michael Polanyi believes that we must alter the foundation of epistemology to include as essential to the very nature of mind, the kind of groping that constitutes the recognition of a problem.

This collection of essays, assembled by Marjorie Grene, exemplifies the development of Polanyi's theory of knowledge which was first presented in Science, Faith, and Society and later systematized in Personal Knowledge.
 
Polanyi believes that the dilemma of the modern mind arises from the peculiar relation between the positivist claim for total objectivity in scientific knowledge and the unprecedented moral dynamism characterizing the social and political aspirations of the last century. The first part of Knowing and Being deals with this theme. Part two develops Polanyi's idea that centralization is incompatible with the life of science as well as his views on the role of tradition and authority in science. The essays on tacit knowing in Part Three proceed directly from his preoccupation with the nature of scientific discovery and reveal a pervasive substructure of all intelligent behavior. Polanyi believes that all knowing involves movement from internal clues to external evidence. Therefore, to explain the process of knowing, we must develop a theory of the nature of living things in general, including an account of that aspect of living things we call "mind." Part Four elaborates upon this theme.

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cover of Knowing by Ear: Listening to Voice Recordings with African Prisoners of War in German Camps (1915–1918)

Knowing by Ear

Listening to Voice Recordings with African Prisoners of War in German Camps (1915–1918)

Anette Hoffmann

Duke University Press, 2024

During World War I, thousands of young African men conscripted to fight for France and Britain were captured and held as prisoners of war in Germany, where their stories and songs were recorded and archived by German linguists. In Knowing by Ear, Anette Hoffmann demonstrates that listening to these acoustic recordings as historical sources, rather than linguistic samples, opens up possibilities for new historical perspectives and the formation of alternate archival practices and knowledge production. She foregrounds the archival presence of individual speakers and positions their recorded voices as responses to their experiences of colonialism, war, and the journey from Africa to Europe. By engaging with the recordings alongside written sources, photographs, and artworks depicting the speakers, Hoffmann personalizes speakers from present-day Senegal, Somalia, Togo, and Congo. Knowing by Ear includes transcriptions of numerous recordings of spoken and sung texts, revealing acoustic archives as significant yet under-researched sources for recovering the historical speaking positions of colonized subjects and listen to the acoustic echo of colonial knowledge production.
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cover of Knowledge Flows in a Global Age: A Transnational Approach

Knowledge Flows in a Global Age

A Transnational Approach

Edited by John Krige

University of Chicago Press, 2022

A transnational approach to understanding and analyzing knowledge circulation.

The contributors to this collection focus on what happens to knowledge and know-how at national borders. Rather than treating it as flowing like currents across them, or diffusing out from center to periphery, they stress the human intervention that shapes how knowledge is processed, mobilized, and repurposed in transnational transactions to serve diverse interests, constraints, and environments. The chapters consider both what knowledge travels and how it travels across borders of varying permeability that impede or facilitate its movement. They look closely at a variety of platforms and objects of knowledge, from tangible commodities—like hybrid wheat seeds, penicillin, Robusta coffee, naval weaponry, seed banks, satellites and high-performance computers—to the more conceptual apparatuses of plant phenotype data and  statistics. Moreover, this volume decenters the Global North, tracking how knowledge moves along multiple paths across the borders of Mexico, India, Portugal, Guinea-Bissau, the Soviet Union, China, Angola, Palestine and the West Bank, as well as the United States and the United Kingdom. An important new work of transnational history, this collection recasts the way we understand and analyze knowledge circulation.
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cover of Knowledge Regulation and National Security in Postwar America

Knowledge Regulation and National Security in Postwar America

Mario Daniels and John Krige

University of Chicago Press, 2022

The first historical study of export control regulations as a tool for the sharing and withholding of knowledge.

In this groundbreaking book, Mario Daniels and John Krige set out to show the enormous political relevance that export control regulations have had for American debates about national security, foreign policy, and trade policy since 1945. Indeed, they argue that from the 1940s to today the issue of how to control the transnational movement of information has been central to the thinking and actions of the guardians of the American national security state. The expansion of control over knowledge and know-how is apparent from the increasingly systematic inclusion of universities and research institutions into a system that in the 1950s and 1960s mainly targeted business activities. As this book vividly reveals, classification was not the only—and not even the most important—regulatory instrument that came into being in the postwar era.
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cover of Knowledge in the Time of Cholera: The Struggle over American Medicine in the Nineteenth Century

Knowledge in the Time of Cholera

The Struggle over American Medicine in the Nineteenth Century

Owen Whooley

University of Chicago Press, 2013

Vomiting. Diarrhea. Dehydration. Death. Confusion. In 1832, the arrival of cholera in the United States created widespread panic throughout the country. For the rest of the century, epidemics swept through American cities and towns like wildfire, killing thousands. Physicians of all stripes offered conflicting answers to the cholera puzzle, ineffectively responding with opiates, bleeding, quarantines, and all manner of remedies, before the identity of the dreaded infection was consolidated under the germ theory of disease some sixty years later.

These cholera outbreaks raised fundamental questions about medical knowledge and its legitimacy, giving fuel to alternative medical sects that used the confusion of the epidemic to challenge both medical orthodoxy and the authority of the still-new American Medical Association. In Knowledge in the Time of Cholera, Owen Whooley tells us the story of those dark days, centering his narrative on rivalries between medical and homeopathic practitioners and bringing to life the battle to control public understanding of disease, professional power, and democratic governance in nineteenth-century America.
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cover of Korea: A Cartographic History

Korea

A Cartographic History

John Rennie Short

University of Chicago Press, 2012

The first general history of Korea as seen through maps, Korea: A Cartographic History provides a beautifully illustrated introduction to how Korea was and is represented cartographically. John Rennie Short, one of today’s most prolific and well-respected geographers, encapsulates six hundred years of maps made by Koreans and non-Koreans alike.
 
Largely chronological in its organization, Korea begins by examining the differing cartographic traditions prevalent in the early Joseon period in Korea—roughly 1400 to 1600—and its temporal equivalent in early modern Europe. As one of the longest continuous dynasties, Joseon rule encompassed an enormous range and depth of cartographic production. Short then surveys the cartographic encounters from 1600 to 1900, distinguishing between the early and late Joseon periods and highlighting the influences of China, Japan, and the rest of the world on Korean cartography. In his final section, Short covers the period from Japanese colonial control of Korea to the present day and demonstrates how some of the tumultuous events of the past hundred years are recorded and contested in maps. He also explores recent cartographic controversies, including the naming of the East Sea/Sea of Japan and claims of ownership of the island of Dokdo.
 
A common theme running throughout Short’s study is how the global flow of knowledge and ideas affects mapmaking, and Short reveals how Korean mapmakers throughout history have embodied, reflected, and even contested these foreign depictions of their homeland.  
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cover of Kuhn's 'Structure of Scientific Revolutions' at Fifty: Reflections on a Science Classic

Kuhn's 'Structure of Scientific Revolutions' at Fifty

Reflections on a Science Classic

Edited by Robert J. Richards and Lorraine Daston

University of Chicago Press, 2016

Thomas S. Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions was a watershed event when it was published in 1962, upending the previous understanding of science as a slow, logical accumulation of facts and introducing, with the concept of the “paradigm shift,” social and psychological considerations into the heart of the scientific process. More than fifty years after its publication, Kuhn’s work continues to influence thinkers in a wide range of fields, including scientists, historians, and sociologists. It is clear that The Structure of Scientific Revolutions itself marks no less of a paradigm shift than those it describes.
           
In Kuhn’s “Structure of Scientific Revolutions” at Fifty, leading social scientists and philosophers explore the origins of Kuhn’s masterwork and its legacy fifty years on. These essays exhume important historical context for Kuhn’s work, critically analyzing its foundations in twentieth-century science, politics, and Kuhn’s own intellectual biography: his experiences as a physics graduate student, his close relationship with psychologists before and after the publication of Structure, and the Cold War framework of terms such as “world view” and “paradigm.”
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