Bøker utgitt av MIT Press Ltd

"A critical examination of psychopathy research and the discriminatory use of the disorder in the criminal justice system"--

How the surge in aerial technologies, such as drones and satellites, influences visual culture beyond the screen.The smooth flight from aerial overview to intimate close-up in Martin Scorsese’s Hugo (2011) exemplifies the concept of proxistant vision: a combination of proximity and distance, close-up and overview, detail, and the big picture in a unified visual form. In Proxistant Vision, Synne Bull and Dragan Miletic develop the concept of proxistant vision and trace its emergence as a visual paradigm of the twenty-first century. As exemplified by Google Earth’s digital swipe between globe perspective and street-level detail, proxistant vision currently proliferates across digital geography, computer games, architectural models, data visualizations, and CGI cinema. It is defined as the combination of proximity and distance in a single image, across a dynamic flight, or zoom. Pointing to the surge in aerial imaging and remote sensing technologies such as drones and satellites, the book moves beyond the screen to include the kinetic architecture of rides and urban observation wheels. The key objective of this study is threefold: to trace the genealogy and understand the technical operation of proxistance as it traveled from periphery to center in the twenty-first century; to explore its alternative potentialities in contemporary art practices; and finally, to reflect critically on the worldviews underpinning different modalities of proxistance in times of environmental crisis. The authors show how the powerful effect of combining proximity and distance, which was already in place with the earliest cartographic inscriptions, has taken precedence on and beyond our screens today.

"This is a history of CHAT (Cultural-Historical Activity Theory): where it came from, how it developed, what challenges it faces when applied to technologically mediated post-bureaucratic work, and how we might further develop it to better address those challenges"--

"Dietary choices greatly impact one's health and environmental footprint, yet making the right choices is a deep scientific challenge well outside most laypersons' scientific background"--

An investigative history of the closure of Harvard University’s geography program in the mid-twentieth century due to homophobia and wider institutional politics.Let Geography Die tells the little-known and oft-misunderstood story of geographical research and education at Harvard University. In investigative fashion, Alison Mountz and Kira Williams unearth the personal and institutional secrets that drove the sudden closure of Harvard’s geography program at the precise moment that it reached its apex. At the heart of this narrative are the hidden personal lives of the queer men recruited to build the geography program—the same ones who were later blamed for its demise. Chief among these figures is Derwent Whittlesey, who eventually became Harvard’s last lone geography professor, once the program he had so successfully built was closed around him. The book weaves together several histories at once: the enactment of homophobic policies under McCarthyism designed to purge queer people from university campuses and government offices; a university President with little regard for the social sciences on a personal mission to dissolve geographic education; fierce, if failed, university politicking to rescue and then resuscitate the program; personal queer lives hidden in plain sight on the edge of campus; and two contemporary queer political geographers on a mission to memorialize the queer people blamed for society’s ills. Let Geography Die exposes the truth behind this important story—as well as its wider haunting of an entire discipline 75 years later—while also restoring the humanity of the central characters involved, especially Derwent Whittlesey.

"A cultural history that reveals how the relentless pursuit of innovation has transformed our society, our institutions, and our inner selves"--

"Traces how aeronauts navigated the interstices of politics, culture, science, and gender to repopularize the hot air balloon, an artifact that had fallen in status since its invention. The author shows how French civil society cultivated popular enthusiasm for flight decades before the advent of the airplane, establishing France as the center of pre-World War I aeronautical culture"--

A fresh research approach that bridges the study of human information interaction and the design of information systems.