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Reimagines the human relationship with technoscience and environment, offering fresh, non-hierarchical, and ethical perspectives beyond dystopian futures.

Exploring the evolving relationship between the human body, technoscience, and the environment, Chimera introduces the concept of the “expanded body” as a transdisciplinary meeting point between art, design, technology, and science. Through a critical examination of developments such as biomechanics, prosthetics, body hacking, and biotechnology, the book investigates how these innovations alter our bodily, sensory, and cognitive capacities. Providing a unique methodological systematization of the main ecological and posthuman philosophy theories, it argues for a new framework in which the human is deeply entangled with both human and nonhuman elements in a shared environment.

Building on ideas from both past and present—ranging from twentieth-century research to current discussions in neuroscience, design, and media theory—Chimera offers a thoughtful response to common fears about futures driven by technology and science. Instead of imagining a world dominated by machines or centered only on human needs, the book imagines fluid, queer, and nonhierarchical relational models between human bodies and the environment. Essential reading for scholars and students in contemporary art, new media, science and technology studies, and environmental and posthuman studies, Chimera also speaks to a wider audience interested in how technology and science are reshaping our understanding of life, identity, and ethical coexistence.
 

Despite China's recent emergence as a major global economic and geopolitical power, its association with counterfeit goods and intellectual property piracy has led many in the West to dismiss its urbanization and globalization as suspect or inauthentic. In Underglobalization Joshua Neves examines the cultural politics of the “fake” and how frictions between legality and legitimacy propel dominant models of economic development and political life in contemporary China. Focusing on a wide range of media technologies and practices in Beijing, Neves shows how piracy and fakes are manifestations of what he calls underglobalization—the ways social actors undermine and refuse to implement the specific procedures and protocols required by globalization at different scales. By tracking the rise of fake politics and transformations in political society, in China and globally, Neves demonstrates that they are alternate outcomes of globalizing processes rather than anathema to them.