A ground-breaking study on how natural disasters can escalate or defuse wars, insurgencies, and other strife. Armed conflict and natural disasters have plagued the twenty-first century. Not since the end of World War II has the number of armed conflicts been higher. At the same time, natural disasters have increased in frequency and intensity over the past two decades, their impacts worsened by climate change, urbanization, and persistent social and economic inequalities. Providing the first comprehensive analysis of the interplay between natural disasters and armed conflict, Catastrophes, Confrontations, and Constraints explores the extent to which disasters facilitate the escalation or abatement of armed conflicts—as well as the ways and contexts in which combatants exploit these catastrophes. Tobias Ide utilizes both qualitative insights and quantitative data to explain the link between disasters and the (de-)escalation of armed conflict and presents over thirty case studies of earthquakes, droughts, floods, and storms in Africa, the Middle East, Asia, and Latin America. He also examines the impact of COVID-19 on armed conflicts in Iraq, Afghanistan, Nigeria, and the Philippines. Catastrophes, Confrontations, and Constraints is an invaluable addition to current debates on climate change, environmental stress, and security. Professionals and students will greatly appreciate the wealth of timely data it provides for their own investigations.

How we can enact meaningful change in computing to meet the urgent need for sustainability and justice. The deep entanglement of information technology with our societies has raised hope for a transition to more sustainable and just communities—those that phase out fossil fuels, distribute public goods fairly, allow free access to information, and waste less. In principle, computing should be able to help. But in practice, we live in a world in which opaque algorithms steer us toward misinformation and unsustainable consumerism. Insolvent shows why computing's dominant frame of thinking is conceptually insufficient to address our current challenges, and why computing continues to incur societal debts it cannot pay back. Christoph Becker shows how we can reorient design perspectives in computer science to better align with the values of sustainability and justice. Becker positions the role of information technology and computing in environmental sustainability, social justice, and the intersection of the two, and explains why designing IT for just sustainability is both technically and ethically challenging. Becker goes on to argue that computing could be aided by critical friends —disciplines that draw on critical social theory, feminist thought, and systems thinking—to make better sense of its role in society. Finally, Becker demonstrates that it is possible to fuse critical perspectives with work in computer science, showing new and fruitful directions for computing professionals and researchers to pursue.

An intimate foray into the invisible work that made it possible for pictures to circulate in print and online from the 1830s to the 2010s. Picture Research focuses on how pictures were saved, stored, and searched for in a time before scanners, servers, and search engines, and describes the dramatic difference it made when images became scannable, searchable, and distributable via the internet. While the camera, the darkroom, and the printed page are well-known sites of photographic production that have been replaced by cell phones, imaging software, and websites, the cultural intermediaries of mass-circulation photography—picture librarians and researchers, editors, and archivists—are less familiar. In this book, Nina Lager Vestberg artfully details the range of research skills, reproduction machinery, and communication infrastructures that was needed to make pictures available to a public before digitization.Drawing on documents and representations across a range of cultural expressions, Picture Research reveals the intermediation that has been performed by skilled workers in a variety of roles, making use of pre-photographic, photographic, and digital machineries of capture, accumulation, extraction, and transmission. Tracing a history of the modern pictorial economy from the pre-photographic 1830s to the post-digitized 2010s, it makes visible and explicit the invisible labor that has built—and still sustains—the visual commodity culture of everyday life.

Literature and neuroscience come together to illuminate the human experience of beauty, which unfolds in time. How does beauty exist in time? This is Gabrielle Starr's central concern in Just in Time as she explores the experience of beauty not as an abstraction, but as the result of psychological and neurological processes in which time is central. Starr shows that aesthetic experience has temporal scale. Starr, a literary scholar and pioneer in the field and method of neuroaesthetics, which seeks the neurological basis of aesthetic experience, applies this methodology to the study of beauty in literature, considering such authors as Rita Dove, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Henry James, Toni Morrison, and Wallace Stevens, as well as the artists Dawoud Bey and Jasper Johns. Just in Time is richly informed by the methods and findings of neuroscientists, whose instruments let them investigate encounters with art down to the millisecond, but Starr goes beyond the laboratory to explore engagements with art that unfold over durations experiments cannot accommodate. In neuroaesthetics, Starr shows us, the techniques of the empirical sciences and humanistic interpretation support and complement one another. To understand the temporal quality of aesthetic experience we need both cognitive and phenomenological approaches, and this book moves boldly toward their synthesis.

A systematic theory of DIY electronic culture, drawn from a century of artists who have independently built creative technologies. Since the rise of Arduino and 3D printing in the mid-2000s, do-it-yourself approaches to the creative exploration of technology have surged in popularity. But the maker movement is not new: it is a historically significant practice in contemporary art and design. This book documents, tracks, and identifies a hundred years of innovative DIY technology practices, illustrating how the maker movement is a continuation of a long-standing creative electronic subculture. Through this comprehensive exploration, Garnet Hertz develops a theory and language of creative DIY electronics, drawing from diverse examples of contemporary art, including work from renowned electronic artists such as Nam June Paik and such art collectives as Survival Research Laboratories and the Barbie Liberation Organization. Hertz uncovers the defining elements of electronic DIY culture, which often works with limited resources to bring new life to obsolete objects while engaging in a critical dialogue with consumer capitalism. Whether hacking blackboxed technologies or deploying culture jamming techniques to critique commercial labor practices or gender norms, the artists have found creative ways to make personal and political statements through creative technologies. The wide range of innovative works and practices profiled in Art + DIY Electronics form a general framework for DIY culture and help inspire readers to get creative with their own adaptations, fabrications, and reimaginations of everyday technologies.

The first comprehensive guide to distributional reinforcement learning, providing a new mathematical formalism for thinking about decisions from a probabilistic perspective. Distributional reinforcement learning is a new mathematical formalism for thinking about decisions. Going beyond the common approach to reinforcement learning and expected values, it focuses on the total reward or return obtained as a consequence of an agent's choices—specifically, how this return behaves from a probabilistic perspective. In this first comprehensive guide to distributional reinforcement learning, Marc G. Bellemare, Will Dabney, and Mark Rowland, who spearheaded development of the field, present its key concepts and review some of its many applications. They demonstrate its power to account for many complex, interesting phenomena that arise from interactions with one's environment. The authors present core ideas from classical reinforcement learning to contextualize distributional topics and include mathematical proofs pertaining to major results discussed in the text. They guide the reader through a series of algorithmic and mathematical developments that, in turn, characterize, compute, estimate, and make decisions on the basis of the random return. Practitioners in disciplines as diverse as finance (risk management), computational neuroscience, computational psychiatry, psychology, macroeconomics, and robotics are already using distributional reinforcement learning, paving the way for its expanding applications in mathematical finance, engineering, and the life sciences. More than a mathematical approach, distributional reinforcement learning represents a new perspective on how intelligent agents make predictions and decisions.

How the use of machine learning to analyze art images has revived formalism in art history, presenting a golden opportunity for art historians and computer scientists to learn from one another. Though formalism is an essential tool for art historians, much recent art history has focused on the social and political aspects of art. But now art historians are adopting machine learning methods to develop new ways to analyze the purely visual in datasets of art images. Amanda Wasielewski uses the term “computational formalism” to describe this use of machine learning and computer vision technique in art historical research. At the same time that art historians are analyzing art images in new ways, computer scientists are using art images for experiments in machine learning and computer vision. Their research, says Wasielewski, would be greatly enriched by the inclusion of humanistic issues. The main purpose in applying computational techniques such as machine learning to art datasets is to automate the process of categorization using metrics such as style, a historically fraught concept in art history. After examining a fifteen-year trajectory in image categorization and art dataset creation in the fields of machine learning and computer vision, Wasielewski considers deep learning techniques that both create and detect forgeries and fakes in art. She investigates examples of art historical analysis in the fields of computer and information sciences, placing this research in the context of art historiography. She also raises questions as which artworks are chosen for digitization, and of those artworks that are born digital, which works gain acceptance into the canon of high art.

One of the first book-length publications on contemporary artist Cheyney Thompson, whose work is known for its radically forward-looking intellectualism and formal rigor. Cheyney Thompson's (b. 1975) work responds to a long history of debates about how art depicts the world, and about how we come to know the world visually. In these meditations on the artist's work, Christian Schaernack shows that for Thompson, reality is something that we can know only in terms of probabilities, not absolutes. Thompson often produces work that explores contingency at the formal level, sometimes in his artistic process itself (as Jackson Pollock once did), and sometimes through the use of external constraints such as computer algorithms, which he subverts as often as he follows. The meaning of observation has changed time and time again in the history of art, just as it has in the history of science. Delving into art history, intellectual history, and contemporary continental philosophy, Schaernack offers a multifaceted study of an artist who challenges our assumptions about how the world is ordered. From Thompson's early “black paintings” to his Chronochromes to the Stochastic Process Paintings , which engage with the algorithms that govern our digital lives, Schaernack presents a contemporary artist whose work embraces chance and responds to the shifting conditions of the present. This is art that reimagines artwork itself.

An argument for the centrality of rights in health security, and how to apply ethical principles to protecting those rights during public health crises. In recent years, efforts to respond to infectious diseases have been described in terms of national and global security, leading to the formation of the field of “health security.” In War on All Fronts , Nicholas G. Evans provides a novel theory of just health security and its relation to the practice of conventional public health. Using COVID-19 as a jumping-off point to examine wider issues, including how the US thinks about and prepares for pandemics, Evans shows the flaws in using the “war metaphor" and how any serious understanding of health security must square with human rights—even when a disease poses a threat to national security. Evans asks what ethical principles justify declaring, and taking action during, a public health emergency such as the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. The relevant principles, he argues, parallel those of the ethics of armed conflict. Just war theory, properly understood, begins with pacifism and a commitment to the right not to be killed and then steps back to ask under what limited conditions it is permissible to kill. In a similar way, a just health security must also begin with the idea that public health should hold human rights sacrosanct and then ask under what limited conditions other concerns might prevail. Evans's overall goal is to formulate a guide to action, particularly as the world deals with the fallout of the COVID-19 pandemic. Turning to the transition from war back to peace in public health, he looks at reparation, rebuilding, and the accountability of actors during the crisis.

Cryptography's essential role in the functioning of the city, viewed against the backdrop of modern digital life. Cryptography is not new to the city; in fact, it is essential to its functioning. For as long as cities have existed, communications have circulated, often in full sight, but with their messages hidden. In Cryptographic City , Richard Coyne explains how cryptography runs deep within the structure of the city. He shows the extent to which cities are built on secrets, their foundations now reinforced by digital encryption and cryptocurrency platforms. He also uses cryptography as a lens through which to inspect smart cities and what they deliver. Coyne sets his investigation into the cryptographic city against the backdrop of the technologies, claims, and challenges of the smart city.Cryptography provides the means by which communications within and between citizens and devices are kept secure. Coyne shows how all of the smart city innovations—from smart toasters to public transportation networks—are enabled by secure financial transactions, data flows, media streaming, and communications made possible by encryption. Without encryption, he says, communications between people and digital devices would be exposed for anyone to see, hack, and misdirect. He explains the relevant technicalities of cryptography and describes the practical difference it makes to frame cities as cryptographic. Interwoven throughout the book are autobiographical anecdotes, insights from Coyne's teaching practice, and historical reports, making it accessible to the general reader.

How a generation of tech-savvy young Cambodians is restoring historical media artifacts from before the war—and, in the process, helping to repair the Khmer Rouge's cultural destruction. During the Khmer Rouge regime (1975–1979), an estimated quarter to a third of the Cambodian population perished from execution, starvation, or disease. The regime especially targeted artists and intellectuals and their work, including films, photographs, and audio recordings. In Media Ruins, Margaret Jack charts the critical role of media in the historical political landscape of Cambodia as well as in its post-conflict reconstruction and reconciliation. Along the way, Jack tells the remarkable stories of resourceful Cambodians in the decades that followed the end of the regime—those who worked to reconstruct their country's media infrastructure and restore their damaged cultural heritage. Jack describes the crucial role that media has played in helping the nation grapple with the traumas of its past and imagine brighter futures. She explores how tech-savvy Cambodian media creators have engaged in practices of infrastructural restitution—work that is both emotionally cathartic and politically vital. She also examines the ways these media creators have used digital tools to restore and disseminate lost media artifacts, while embracing an aesthetic of material decay as a visible reminder of loss. As these creators reconcile with the past, they are also finding ways to navigate the country's increasingly authoritarian media landscape. Bringing media and technology studies into conversation with trauma and memory studies, the book provides a unique, and necessary, perspective on post-conflict reconstruction.

How to understand the mistakes we make about those on the other side of the political spectrum—and how they drive the affective polarization that is tearing us apart. It's well known that the political divide in the United States—particularly between Democrats and Republicans—has grown to alarming levels in recent decades. Affective polarization —emotional polarization, or the hostility between the parties—has reached an unprecedented fever pitch. In Undue Hate , Daniel F. Stone tackles the biases undergirding affective polarization head-on. Stone explains why we often develop objectively false, and overly negative, beliefs about the other side—causing us to dislike them more than we should. Approaching affective polarization through the lens of behavioral economics, Undue Hate is unique in its use of simple mathematical concepts and models to illustrate how we misjudge those we disagree with, for both political and nonpolitical issues. Stone argues that while our biases may vary, just about all of us unwisely exacerbate conflict at times—managing to make ourselves worse off in the long run. Finally, the book offers both short- and long-term solutions for tempering our bias and limiting its negative consequences—and, just maybe, finding a way back to understanding one another before it is too late.

How prisoners serve as media laborers, while the prison serves as a testing ground for new media technologies. Prisons are not typically known for cutting-edge media technologies. Yet from photography in the nineteenth century to AI-enhanced tracking cameras today, there is a long history of prisons being used as a testing ground for technologies that are later adopted by the general public. If we recognize the prison as a central site for the development of media technologies, how might that change our understanding of both media systems and carceral systems? Prison Media foregrounds the ways in which the prison is a model space for the control and transmission of information, a place where media is produced, and a medium in its own right. Examining the relationship between media and prison architecture, as surveillance and communication technologies are literally built into the facilities, this study also considers the ways in which prisoners themselves often do hard labor as media workers—labor that contributes in direct and indirect ways to the latest technologies developed and sold by multinational corporations like Amazon. There is a fine line between ankle monitors and Fitbits, and Prison Media helps us make sense of today's carceral society.

A rich exploration of the extraordinary life and work of celebrated architect Yasmeen Lari, winner of the 2023 RIBA Royal Gold Medal. After more than three decades as a renowned global architect, Yasmeen Lari, the first woman to open her own architecture firm in Pakistan in 1964, developed Zero Carbon Architecture, which unites ecological and social justice. This volume, edited by Angelika Fitz, Elke Krasny, and Marvi Mazhar, presents Lari's trajectory from exemplary modernist to zero carbon revolutionary, with a focus on her remarkable contributions to the global architectural movement to decarbonize and decolonize. The book includes extensive photographs, drawings, and plans from Lari's archive, most of which have not previously been shown or published. Lari's architectural thinking and activism have always gone beyond the quest for a singular built solution. Rather, she strategically plans systemic approaches and solutions, be it for housing, a heritage foundation, or zero-carbon shelters with communities at risk. Original essays from diverse international contributors contextualize Lari's work; investigate architecture and the postimperial, postcolonial, and postpartition condition; and examine the intersections of architecture and human rights, climate change, decolonization, gender, care, activism, and vernacular innovation. More than a tribute to Yasmeen Lari's extraordinary career, this volume brings her legacy forward and shows how to create change today Contributors: Abira Ashfaq, Cassandra Cozza, Angelika Fitz, Runa Kahn, Anne Karpf, Elke Krasny, Marvi Mazhar, Marvi Mazhar, Chris Moffat, Anila Naeem, Raquel Rolnik, Helen Thomas, Rafia Zakaria

An in-depth and troubling look at a little-known group of immigrants—noncitizen soldiers who enlist in the US military. While the popular image of the US military is one of citizen soldiers protecting their country, the reality is that nearly 5 percent of all first-time military recruits are noncitizens. Their reasons for enlisting are myriad, but many are motivated by the hope of gaining citizenship in return for their service. In Green Card Soldier , Sofya Aptekar talks to more than seventy noncitizen soldiers from twenty-three countries, including some who were displaced by conflict after the US military entered their homeland. She identifies a disturbing pattern: the US military's intervention in foreign countries drives migration, which in turn supplies the military with a cheap and desperate labor pool—thereby perpetuating the cycle. As Aptekar discovers, serving in the US military is no guarantee against deportation, and yet the promise of citizenship and the threat of deportation are the carrot and stick used to discipline noncitizen soldiers. Viewed at various times as security threats and members of a model minority, immigrant soldiers sometimes face intense discrimination from their native-born colleagues and superiors. Their stories—stitched through with colonial legacies, white supremacy, exploitation, and patriarchy—show how the tensions between deservingness and suspicion shape their enlistment, service, and identities. Giving voice to this little-heard group of immigrants, Green Card Soldier shines a cold light on the complex workings of US empire, globalized militarism, and citizenship.

A comprehensive theoretical and practical guide to the operating principles of knowledge auditing, illustrated with numerous case studies. A knowledge audit provides an “at a glance” view of an organization's needs and opportunities. Its purpose is to improve an organization's effectiveness through a better understanding of the dynamics and levers of knowledge production, access, and use. However, this developing field is hampered by the lack of a common language about the origins and nature of knowledge auditing. In Principles of Knowledge Auditing , Patrick Lambe integrates the theory and practices of the field, laying out principles and guidelines for a clearer and more pragmatic approach to knowledge auditing that makes it more accessible to practitioners and researchers. Lambe examines knowledge auditing in the context of the development of communications, information, and knowledge management in the twentieth century. He critiques and clarifies ambiguities in how knowledge audits are approached and described, as well as how the results are conveyed within organizations. He discusses the benefits and risks of knowledge management standards. Knowledge auditors, he says, need a common frame of reference more than they need standards. Standards have their uses, but they provide only markers and signposts and are poor representations of the richness of the landscape. He concludes with a set of guiding principles for practitioners.

A concise, reader-friendly overview of pragmatism, the most influential school of American philosophical thought. Pragmatism, America's homegrown philosophy, has been a major intellectual movement for over a century. Unlike its rivals, it reaches well beyond the confines of philosophy into concerns and disciplines as diverse as religion, politics, science, and culture. In this concise, engagingly written overview, John R. Shook describes pragmatism's origins, concepts, and continuing global relevance and appeal. With attention to the movement's original thinkers—Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, John Dewey, and George Herbert Mead—as well as its contemporary proponents, he explains how pragmatism thinks about what is real, what can be known, and what minds are doing. And because of pragmatism's far-reaching impact, Shook shows how its views on reality, truth, knowledge, and cognition coordinate with its approaches to agency, sociality, human nature, and personhood.

An in-depth look at Ukraine's attempts to shape how it is perceived by the rest of the world. During times of crisis, competing narratives are often advanced to define what is happening, and the stakes of information management by nations are high. In this timely book, Göran Bolin and Per Ståhlberg examine the fraught intersection of state politics, corporate business, and civil activism to understand the dynamics and importance of meaning management in Ukraine. Drawing on fieldwork inside the country, the authors discuss the forms, agents, and platforms within the complex political and communicative situation and how each articulated and acted upon perceptions of the propaganda threat. Bolin and Ståhlberg focus their analysis on the period between 2013 and 2022, when political tensions, commercial dynamics, and new communication technologies bred novel forms of information management. As they show, entities from governments and governmental administration to commercial actors, entrepreneurs, and activists formed new alliances in order to claim a stake in information policy. Bolin and Ståhlberg also explore how the various agents engaged in information management and strove to manage meaning in communication practice; the communicative tools they took advantage of; and the subsequent consequences for narrative constructions.

Interdisciplinary essays on music psychology that integrate scientific, humanistic, and artistic ways of knowing in transformative ways. Researchers using scientific methods and approaches to advance our understanding of music and musicality have not yet grappled with some of the perils that humanistic fields concentrating on music have long articulated. In this edited volume, established and emerging researchers—neuroscientists and cognitive scientists, musicians, historical musicologists, and ethnomusicologists—build bridges between humanistic and scientific approaches to music studies, particularly music psychology. Deftly edited by Elizabeth H. Margulis, Psyche Loui, and Deirdre Loughridge, The Science-Music Borderlands embodies how sustained interaction among disciplines can lead to a richer understanding of musical life. The essays in this volume provide the scientific study of music with its first major reckoning, exploring the intellectual history of the field and its central debates, while charting a path forward. The Science-Music Borderlands is essential reading for music scholars from any disciplinary background. It will also interest those working at the intersection of music and science, such as music teachers, performers, composers, and music therapists. Contributors: Manuel Anglada-Tort, Salwa El-Sawan Castelo-Branco, Hu Chuan-Peng, Laura K. Cirelli, Alexander W. Cowan, Jonathan De Souza, Diana Deutsch, Diandra Duengen, Sarah Faber, Steven Feld, Shinya Fujii, Assal Habibi, Erin. E. Hannon, Shantala Hegde, Beatriz Ilari, Jason Jabbour, Nori Jacoby, Haley E. Kragness, Grace Leslie, Casey Lew-Williams, Deirdre Loughridge, Psyche Loui, Diana Mangalagiu, Elizabeth H. Margulis, Randy McIntosh, Rita McNamara, Eduardo Reck Miranda, Daniel Müllensiefen, Rachel Mundy, Florence Ewomazino Nweke, Patricia Opondo, Aniruddh D. Patel, Andrea Ravignani, Carmel Raz, Matthew Sachs, Marianne Sarfati, Patrick E. Savage, Huib Schippers, Jim Sykes, Gary Tomlinson, Jamal Williams, Maria A. G. Witek, Pamela Z

New resources for the critique of capitalism in culture from the late writings of Georg Lukács, one of the first authors in the tradition of Western Marxism. The Hungarian literary critic, philosopher, and Marxist social theorist Georg Lukács is best known for his 1923 History and Class Consciousness , in which he offered an influential critique of reification from the standpoint of a dialectical conception of totality. While Lukács's early works have been central to the study of Marxist thought, his later works have often been dismissed as political accommodations to Stalinism. In this new study, Matthew Smetona argues for a revisionist interpretation of Lukács's later writings on topics as diverse as aesthetics, politics, and ontology. Smetona demonstrates that these writings reveal a methodological unity that follows directly from History and Class Consciousness , in which realism, in both literary and extraliterary senses, becomes the basis for the critique of reification. As Lukács had demonstrated, reification is that process by which the social relations between persons seem to take on the character of a thing. Rooted in Marx's concept of commodity fetishism, the critique of reification proved, in Lukács's hands, to be a flexible tool capable of clarifying all manner of obfuscations that arise within the social relations that capitalism produces. To recover the later work of Lukács is to open up new horizons for Marxist cultural criticism.