Tag: Futures

Fukushima Futures Survival Stories in a Repeatedly Ruined Seascape


Free Download Fukushima Futures: Survival Stories in a Repeatedly Ruined Seascape (Culture, Place, and Nature) by Satsuki Takahashi
English | July 25, 2023 | ISBN: 0295751339, 0295751347 | True EPUB | 194 pages | 8.7 MB
Both before and after the 2011 "Triple Disaster" of earthquake, tidal wave, and consequent meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, anthropologist Satsuki Takahashi visited nearby communities, collecting accounts of life and livelihoods along the industrialized seascape. The resulting environmental ethnography examines the complex relationship between commercial fishing families and the Joban Sea―once known for premium-quality fish and now notorious as the location of the world’s worst nuclear catastrophe.

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Biopolitical Futures in Twenty-First-Century Speculative Fiction


Free Download Sherryl Vint, "Biopolitical Futures in Twenty-First-Century Speculative Fiction"
English | 2021 | ISBN: 1108839002 | PDF | pages: 282 | 1.1 mb
Drawing on a rich array of twenty-first-century speculative fiction, this book demonstrates how the commodification of life through biotechnology has far-reaching implications for how we think of personhood, agency, and value. Sherryl Vint argues that neoliberalism is reinventing life under biocapital. She offers new biopolitical figurations that can help theoretically grasp and politically respond to a distinctive twenty-first-century biopolitics. This book theorizes how biotechnology intervenes in the very processes of biological function, reshaping life itself to serve economic ends. Linking fictional texts with material examples, Biopolitical Futures in Twenty-First-Century Speculative Fiction shows how these practices are linked to new modes of exploitative economic relations that cannot be redressed by human rights. It concludes with a posthumanist reframing of the value of life that grounds itself elsewhere than in capitalist logics, a vision that, in a Covid age, might become fundamental to a new politics of ecological relations.

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Post-Human Futures Human Enhancement, Artificial Intelligence and Social Theory


Free Download Mark Carrigan, "Post-Human Futures: Human Enhancement, Artificial Intelligence and Social Theory "
English | ISBN: 0815392788 | 2021 | 176 pages | PDF | 9 MB
This volume engages with post-humanist and transhumanist approaches to present an original exploration of the question of how humankind will fare in the face of artificial intelligence. With emerging technologies now widely assumed to be calling into question assumptions about human beings and their place within the world, and computational innovations of machine learning leading some to claim we are coming ever closer to the long-sought artificial general intelligence, it defends humanity with the argument that technological ‘advances’ introduced artificially into some humans do not annul their fundamental human qualities. Against the challenge presented by the possibility that advanced artificial intelligence will be fully capable of original thinking, creative self-development and moral judgement and therefore have claims to legal rights, the authors advance a form of ‘essentialism’ that justifies providing a ‘decent minimum life’ for all persons. As such, while the future of the human is in question, the authors show how dispensing with either the category itself or the underlying reality is a less plausible solution than is often assumed.

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Envisioning Caribbean Futures Jamaican Perspectives


Free Download Brian Meeks, "Envisioning Caribbean Futures: Jamaican Perspectives"
English | 2007 | ISBN: 9766402000 | PDF | pages: 212 | 4.7 mb
Employing critical analysis of Caribbean intellectual thought and of the postcolonial political economy, this book proposes a manifesto for the future. It suggests a form of participatory reorganization without, necessarily, dismantling the fundamentals of formal democratic organization.

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Uncertain Futures How to Unlock the Climate Impasse


Free Download Uncertain Futures: How to Unlock the Climate Impasse
English | 2023 | ISBN: 1009405292 | 312 Pages | PDF | 4 MB
Why is the world not moving fast enough to solve the climate crisis? Politics stand in the way, but experts hope that green investments, compensation, and retraining could unlock the impasse. However, these measures often lack credibility. Not only do communities fear these policies could be reversed, but they have seen promises broken before. Uncertain Futures proposes solutions to make more credible promises that build support for the energy transition. It examines the perspectives of workers, communities, and companies, arguing that the climate impasse is best understood by viewing the problem from the ground up. Featuring voices on the front lines such as a commissioner in Carbon County deciding whether to welcome wind, executives at energy companies searching for solutions, mayors and unions in Minnesota battling for local jobs, and fairgoers in coal country navigating their uncertain future, this book contends that making economic transitions work means making promises credible.

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Decolonizing Education for Sustainable Futures


Free Download Yvette Hutchinson, "Decolonizing Education for Sustainable Futures "
English | ISBN: 1529226082 | 2023 | 288 pages | PDF | 10 MB
Bringing together the perspectives of researchers, policy makers, activists, educators and practitioners, this book critically interrogates the Western-centric assumptions underpinning education and development agendas and the colonial legacies of violence they often uphold. The book considers the crucial connection between the idea of sustainable futures and the demand to decolonize education. Containing an innovative mixture of text, stories and poetry, it explores how decolonized futures can be conceived and enacted, offering theoretical and practical examples, including from practice in educational and cultural organizations. In doing so, the book highlights education’s potential role in facilitating processes of reparative justice that can contribute to decolonized futures.

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Facing Our Futures How foresight, futures design and strategy creates prosperity and growth


Free Download Facing Our Futures: How foresight, futures design and strategy creates prosperity and growth by Nikolas Badminton
English | February 14, 2023 | ISBN: 1399400231 | 029 pages | PDF | 1.71 Mb
A fascinating insight into how professionals and businesses can develop their foresight and strategy to ensure that they are prepared for an unpredictable future.

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