Amanda C. Cote
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- January 2021
- ISBN:
- 9781479838523
- eISBN:
- 9781479802210
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- NYU Press
- DOI:
- 10.18574/nyu/9781479838523.001.0001
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Media Studies
In 2012, video gaming culture saw an interesting, paradoxical divergence. On one hand, game journalists and trade organizations testified that gaming had significantly diversified from its masculine ...
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In 2012, video gaming culture saw an interesting, paradoxical divergence. On one hand, game journalists and trade organizations testified that gaming had significantly diversified from its masculine roots, with women comprising nearly half of all gamers. On the other hand, gaming spaces witnessed increasing, public incidents of sexism and misogyny. Gaming Sexism analyzes the video game industry and its players to explain the roots of these contradictory narratives, how they coexist, and what their divergence means in terms of power and gender equality. Media studies scholar Amanda C. Cote first turns to video game magazines to assess how longstanding expectations for “gamers” are shifting, how this provokes anxiety in traditional audiences, and how these players resist change, at times employing harassment and sexism to drive out new audience members. She follows this analysis by interviewing female players, to see how their experiences have been affected by games’ changing environment. Interviewees reveal many persistent barriers to full participation in gaming, including overtly and implicitly sexist elements within texts, gaming audiences, and the industry. At the same time, participants have developed nuanced strategies for managing their exclusion, pursuing positive gaming experiences, and competing with men on their own turf. Thus, Gaming Sexism reveals extensive, persistent problems in achieving gender equality in gaming. However, it also demonstrates the power of a motivated, marginalized audience, and draws on their experiences to explore how structural inequalities in gaming spaces—and culture more broadly—can themselves be gamed and overcome.Less
In 2012, video gaming culture saw an interesting, paradoxical divergence. On one hand, game journalists and trade organizations testified that gaming had significantly diversified from its masculine roots, with women comprising nearly half of all gamers. On the other hand, gaming spaces witnessed increasing, public incidents of sexism and misogyny. Gaming Sexism analyzes the video game industry and its players to explain the roots of these contradictory narratives, how they coexist, and what their divergence means in terms of power and gender equality. Media studies scholar Amanda C. Cote first turns to video game magazines to assess how longstanding expectations for “gamers” are shifting, how this provokes anxiety in traditional audiences, and how these players resist change, at times employing harassment and sexism to drive out new audience members. She follows this analysis by interviewing female players, to see how their experiences have been affected by games’ changing environment. Interviewees reveal many persistent barriers to full participation in gaming, including overtly and implicitly sexist elements within texts, gaming audiences, and the industry. At the same time, participants have developed nuanced strategies for managing their exclusion, pursuing positive gaming experiences, and competing with men on their own turf. Thus, Gaming Sexism reveals extensive, persistent problems in achieving gender equality in gaming. However, it also demonstrates the power of a motivated, marginalized audience, and draws on their experiences to explore how structural inequalities in gaming spaces—and culture more broadly—can themselves be gamed and overcome.
Kelly Underman
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- January 2021
- ISBN:
- 9781479897780
- eISBN:
- 9781479836338
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- NYU Press
- DOI:
- 10.18574/nyu/9781479897780.001.0001
- Subject:
- Sociology, Science, Technology and Environment
Gynecological teaching associates (GTAs) are trained laypeople who teach medical students the communication and technical skills of the pelvic examination while simultaneously serving as live models ...
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Gynecological teaching associates (GTAs) are trained laypeople who teach medical students the communication and technical skills of the pelvic examination while simultaneously serving as live models on whose bodies these same students practice. These programs are widespread in the United States and present a fascinating case for understanding contemporary emotional socialization in medical education. Feeling Medicine traces the origins of these programs in the Women’s Health Movement and in the nascent field of medical education research in the 1970s. It explores how these programs work at three major medical schools in Chicago using archival sources and interviews with GTAs, medical faculty, and medical students. This book argues that GTA programs embody the tension in medical education between the drive toward science and the ever-presence of emotion. It claims that new regimes of governance in medical education today rely on the modification of affect, or embodied capacities to feel and form attachments. Feeling Medicine thus explores what it means to make good physicians in an era of corporatized healthcare. In the process, it considers the role of simulation and the meaning of patient empowerment in the medical profession, as well as the practices that foster caring commitments between physicians and their patients—and those that are exploitable by for-profit healthcare.Less
Gynecological teaching associates (GTAs) are trained laypeople who teach medical students the communication and technical skills of the pelvic examination while simultaneously serving as live models on whose bodies these same students practice. These programs are widespread in the United States and present a fascinating case for understanding contemporary emotional socialization in medical education. Feeling Medicine traces the origins of these programs in the Women’s Health Movement and in the nascent field of medical education research in the 1970s. It explores how these programs work at three major medical schools in Chicago using archival sources and interviews with GTAs, medical faculty, and medical students. This book argues that GTA programs embody the tension in medical education between the drive toward science and the ever-presence of emotion. It claims that new regimes of governance in medical education today rely on the modification of affect, or embodied capacities to feel and form attachments. Feeling Medicine thus explores what it means to make good physicians in an era of corporatized healthcare. In the process, it considers the role of simulation and the meaning of patient empowerment in the medical profession, as well as the practices that foster caring commitments between physicians and their patients—and those that are exploitable by for-profit healthcare.
Chelsea Stieber
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- January 2021
- ISBN:
- 9781479802135
- eISBN:
- 9781479802166
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- NYU Press
- DOI:
- 10.18574/nyu/9781479802135.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
This book begins where so many others conclude: 1804. Recent scholarship has begun to explore the challenges that Atlantic world powers posed to Haitian sovereignty and legitimacy during the Age of ...
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This book begins where so many others conclude: 1804. Recent scholarship has begun to explore the challenges that Atlantic world powers posed to Haitian sovereignty and legitimacy during the Age of Revolution, but there existed an equally important internal challenge to Haiti’s post-independence sovereignty: a civil war between those who envisioned a military authoritarian empire and those who wished to establish a liberal republic. This book argues that the post-independence civil war context is central to understanding Haiti’s long postcolonial nineteenth century: the foundational political, intellectual, and regional tensions that constitute Haiti’s fundamental plurality. Considerable work has been dedicated to unearthing the uneven and unequal production of historical narratives about Haiti in the wake of Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s groundbreaking Silencing the Past, but many more narratives—namely, those produced from within Haitian historiography and literary history—remain to be questioned and deconstructed. This book unearths and continually probes the conceptually generative possibilities of Haiti’s post-revolutionary divisions, something the current historiographic framework on Haiti’s long postcolonial nineteenth century fails to fully apprehend. Through close readings of original print sources (pamphlets, newspapers, literary magazines, geographies, histories, poems, and novels), it sheds light on the internal realities, tensions, and pluralities that shaped the Haitian Revolution and its aftermath to reveal the process of contestation, mutual definition, and continual (re)inscription of Haiti’s meaning throughout its long nineteenth century.Less
This book begins where so many others conclude: 1804. Recent scholarship has begun to explore the challenges that Atlantic world powers posed to Haitian sovereignty and legitimacy during the Age of Revolution, but there existed an equally important internal challenge to Haiti’s post-independence sovereignty: a civil war between those who envisioned a military authoritarian empire and those who wished to establish a liberal republic. This book argues that the post-independence civil war context is central to understanding Haiti’s long postcolonial nineteenth century: the foundational political, intellectual, and regional tensions that constitute Haiti’s fundamental plurality. Considerable work has been dedicated to unearthing the uneven and unequal production of historical narratives about Haiti in the wake of Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s groundbreaking Silencing the Past, but many more narratives—namely, those produced from within Haitian historiography and literary history—remain to be questioned and deconstructed. This book unearths and continually probes the conceptually generative possibilities of Haiti’s post-revolutionary divisions, something the current historiographic framework on Haiti’s long postcolonial nineteenth century fails to fully apprehend. Through close readings of original print sources (pamphlets, newspapers, literary magazines, geographies, histories, poems, and novels), it sheds light on the internal realities, tensions, and pluralities that shaped the Haitian Revolution and its aftermath to reveal the process of contestation, mutual definition, and continual (re)inscription of Haiti’s meaning throughout its long nineteenth century.
Jennifer Patico
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- January 2021
- ISBN:
- 9781479835331
- eISBN:
- 9781479817214
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- NYU Press
- DOI:
- 10.18574/nyu/9781479835331.001.0001
- Subject:
- Anthropology, Social and Cultural Anthropology
In the wake of school lunch reform debates, heated classroom cupcake wars, and worries about childhood obesity, children’s food is a locus of anxiety and “crisis” in the United States. What does the ...
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In the wake of school lunch reform debates, heated classroom cupcake wars, and worries about childhood obesity, children’s food is a locus of anxiety and “crisis” in the United States. What does the feeding of children—and adults’ often impassioned, worried talk about the foods children eat—say about middle-class parents’ understandings of what it means to parent well, and about the kinds of individuals they feel compelled to create in their children? How are these understandings reflective of a larger political economic moment, and how do they reinforce existing forms of social inequality? This book takes up those questions through in-depth ethnographic research in “Hometown,” an urban Atlanta charter school community. Embedding herself in school events, after-school meetings, school lunchrooms, and private homes, the author observed how children’s food was a locus for fundamental moral tensions about how to live, how to present oneself, and how to be protected from harm in a neoliberal environment. Middle-class parents took responsibility for protecting their children from an industrialized food system and for cultivating children’s self-management in food and other realms; yet they did so in ways that ultimately and unintentionally tended to reinforce class privilege and the effects of social inequality. Listening closely to adults’—and children’s—food concerns and contextualizing them both very locally and vis-à-vis a broader political economy, this book interrogates those unintended effects and asks how the “crisis” of children’s food might be reimagined toward different ends.Less
In the wake of school lunch reform debates, heated classroom cupcake wars, and worries about childhood obesity, children’s food is a locus of anxiety and “crisis” in the United States. What does the feeding of children—and adults’ often impassioned, worried talk about the foods children eat—say about middle-class parents’ understandings of what it means to parent well, and about the kinds of individuals they feel compelled to create in their children? How are these understandings reflective of a larger political economic moment, and how do they reinforce existing forms of social inequality? This book takes up those questions through in-depth ethnographic research in “Hometown,” an urban Atlanta charter school community. Embedding herself in school events, after-school meetings, school lunchrooms, and private homes, the author observed how children’s food was a locus for fundamental moral tensions about how to live, how to present oneself, and how to be protected from harm in a neoliberal environment. Middle-class parents took responsibility for protecting their children from an industrialized food system and for cultivating children’s self-management in food and other realms; yet they did so in ways that ultimately and unintentionally tended to reinforce class privilege and the effects of social inequality. Listening closely to adults’—and children’s—food concerns and contextualizing them both very locally and vis-à-vis a broader political economy, this book interrogates those unintended effects and asks how the “crisis” of children’s food might be reimagined toward different ends.
Kevin M. Fitzpatrick and Matthew L. Spialek
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- January 2021
- ISBN:
- 9781479800735
- eISBN:
- 9781479800780
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- NYU Press
- DOI:
- 10.18574/nyu/9781479800735.001.0001
- Subject:
- Sociology, Social Stratification, Inequality, and Mobility
Early June begins the Southern Hemisphere hurricane season. Stretching into November, it can often be a time of weary waiting and cautious optimism for coastal residents. Clear skies and calm seas ...
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Early June begins the Southern Hemisphere hurricane season. Stretching into November, it can often be a time of weary waiting and cautious optimism for coastal residents. Clear skies and calm seas can quickly give way to disaster. On August 27, 2017, a Category 4 hurricane (Harvey), targeting the Texas Gulf Coast and packing winds of over 130 miles per hour, wreaked havoc and created a path of destruction with bands of rain that seemingly went on forever. Lives were lost, neighborhoods devastated, resiliency cracked; yet people continued helping each other, and the recovery process began. Fitzpatrick and Spialek tell a complicated story of heartache, destruction, resiliency, recovery, and hope. Through over 300 interviews from Hurricane Harvey survivors living along the Texas Gulf Coast, their stories tell an all-too-familiar tale. Interviewing survivors with diverse displacement experiences, the authors create a narrative around who, what, where, and why residents sought refuge in shelters, hotels, and other alternative locations. Some residents have since moved back. Others have been rebuilding for months and even years. And there are some residents who will never return home. Their stories, circumstances, and insight into the recovery processes are all very different, yet intimately tied together through an understanding of how race and place come to define their experiences. This book tells survivors’ stories while emphasizing that who those survivors were and where they lived had a major impact on these tales of destruction, resiliency, and recovery.Less
Early June begins the Southern Hemisphere hurricane season. Stretching into November, it can often be a time of weary waiting and cautious optimism for coastal residents. Clear skies and calm seas can quickly give way to disaster. On August 27, 2017, a Category 4 hurricane (Harvey), targeting the Texas Gulf Coast and packing winds of over 130 miles per hour, wreaked havoc and created a path of destruction with bands of rain that seemingly went on forever. Lives were lost, neighborhoods devastated, resiliency cracked; yet people continued helping each other, and the recovery process began. Fitzpatrick and Spialek tell a complicated story of heartache, destruction, resiliency, recovery, and hope. Through over 300 interviews from Hurricane Harvey survivors living along the Texas Gulf Coast, their stories tell an all-too-familiar tale. Interviewing survivors with diverse displacement experiences, the authors create a narrative around who, what, where, and why residents sought refuge in shelters, hotels, and other alternative locations. Some residents have since moved back. Others have been rebuilding for months and even years. And there are some residents who will never return home. Their stories, circumstances, and insight into the recovery processes are all very different, yet intimately tied together through an understanding of how race and place come to define their experiences. This book tells survivors’ stories while emphasizing that who those survivors were and where they lived had a major impact on these tales of destruction, resiliency, and recovery.
Adam M. Messinger and Xavier L. Guadalupe-Diaz (eds)
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- January 2021
- ISBN:
- 9781479830428
- eISBN:
- 9781479829095
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- NYU Press
- DOI:
- 10.18574/nyu/9781479830428.001.0001
- Subject:
- Sociology, Law, Crime and Deviance
A growing body of research finds that upward of half of transgender people experience intimate partner violence (IPV)—psychological, physical, or sexual abuse in romantic and sexual relationships—in ...
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A growing body of research finds that upward of half of transgender people experience intimate partner violence (IPV)—psychological, physical, or sexual abuse in romantic and sexual relationships—in their lifetimes, and consequences can be severe. Despite this, the movement to end IPV has focused almost exclusively on cisgender individuals, resulting in many transgender IPV (T-IPV) survivors being underserved and overlooked by the very laws and victim agencies tasked with protecting survivors. Research has illuminated a variety of unique aspects of T-IPV regarding the predictors of perpetration, the specific forms of abuse experienced, barriers to help seeking for survivors, and policy and intervention needs. As the first of its kind, this volume brings together leading T-IPV researchers and service providers to offer a comprehensive overview of past research and identify evidence-based strategies to foster systemic change in how transgender abuse is addressed in our policies and services. First the volume details known patterns of transgender abuse and examines, through an intersectional framework, the myriad ways in which discrimination and social inequality promote and enhance T-IPV. Second, the volume discusses how transphobia and cisnormativity impact the causes of T-IPV, survivor resiliency, and help seeking. Third, the volume reviews and critiques existing practices in how health care, shelters, policing, and the legal system intervene in T-IPV. The volume concludes with recommendations for transforming public health prevention, service provision, and research to ultimately build a safer and more inclusive world for transgender communities.Less
A growing body of research finds that upward of half of transgender people experience intimate partner violence (IPV)—psychological, physical, or sexual abuse in romantic and sexual relationships—in their lifetimes, and consequences can be severe. Despite this, the movement to end IPV has focused almost exclusively on cisgender individuals, resulting in many transgender IPV (T-IPV) survivors being underserved and overlooked by the very laws and victim agencies tasked with protecting survivors. Research has illuminated a variety of unique aspects of T-IPV regarding the predictors of perpetration, the specific forms of abuse experienced, barriers to help seeking for survivors, and policy and intervention needs. As the first of its kind, this volume brings together leading T-IPV researchers and service providers to offer a comprehensive overview of past research and identify evidence-based strategies to foster systemic change in how transgender abuse is addressed in our policies and services. First the volume details known patterns of transgender abuse and examines, through an intersectional framework, the myriad ways in which discrimination and social inequality promote and enhance T-IPV. Second, the volume discusses how transphobia and cisnormativity impact the causes of T-IPV, survivor resiliency, and help seeking. Third, the volume reviews and critiques existing practices in how health care, shelters, policing, and the legal system intervene in T-IPV. The volume concludes with recommendations for transforming public health prevention, service provision, and research to ultimately build a safer and more inclusive world for transgender communities.
Geoff Harkness
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- January 2021
- ISBN:
- 9781479889075
- eISBN:
- 9781479809547
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- NYU Press
- DOI:
- 10.18574/nyu/9781479889075.001.0001
- Subject:
- Political Science, Middle Eastern Politics
Qatar is the wealthiest country in the world—and one of the fastest growing. Its current population is five times larger than it was in 2000. Photos of the Arabian Gulf micronation from the 1980s ...
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Qatar is the wealthiest country in the world—and one of the fastest growing. Its current population is five times larger than it was in 2000. Photos of the Arabian Gulf micronation from the 1980s show a few modest one-story buildings. Today, Qatar’s capital, Doha, is a modern petro-boomtown whose futuristic skyline features a phalanx of space-age skyscrapers. In 2022, Qatar will be the first Arab nation to host the FIFA World Cup. To prepare, Qatar’s government has imported more than one million low-wage workers to construct outdoor air-conditioned soccer stadiums, subway systems, and megahotels. Today, Qatari nationals represent only about 10 percent of their country’s population. Changing Qatar explores how citizenship and nationality are reshaped in these global processes. The nation’s dynastic ruling family assures its conservative Muslim citizenry that Qatar’s rapid modernization will take place alongside cultural preservation. In doing so, the leadership employs modern traditionalism, a flexible narrative framework in which customary and contemporary are strategically merged. Based on three years of immersive fieldwork and 130 revealing interviews, Changing Qatar goes beyond the slogans to examine how the people who inhabit Qatar are coming to terms with its ascent. The book demonstrates how Qataris and non-Qataris reaffirm—and challenge—traditions in many areas of everyday life, from dating and marriage to clothing and humor to gender and sports. A cultural study of citizenship, Changing Qatar delivers a richly detailed portrait of this rising Gulf nation that cannot be found elsewhere.Less
Qatar is the wealthiest country in the world—and one of the fastest growing. Its current population is five times larger than it was in 2000. Photos of the Arabian Gulf micronation from the 1980s show a few modest one-story buildings. Today, Qatar’s capital, Doha, is a modern petro-boomtown whose futuristic skyline features a phalanx of space-age skyscrapers. In 2022, Qatar will be the first Arab nation to host the FIFA World Cup. To prepare, Qatar’s government has imported more than one million low-wage workers to construct outdoor air-conditioned soccer stadiums, subway systems, and megahotels. Today, Qatari nationals represent only about 10 percent of their country’s population. Changing Qatar explores how citizenship and nationality are reshaped in these global processes. The nation’s dynastic ruling family assures its conservative Muslim citizenry that Qatar’s rapid modernization will take place alongside cultural preservation. In doing so, the leadership employs modern traditionalism, a flexible narrative framework in which customary and contemporary are strategically merged. Based on three years of immersive fieldwork and 130 revealing interviews, Changing Qatar goes beyond the slogans to examine how the people who inhabit Qatar are coming to terms with its ascent. The book demonstrates how Qataris and non-Qataris reaffirm—and challenge—traditions in many areas of everyday life, from dating and marriage to clothing and humor to gender and sports. A cultural study of citizenship, Changing Qatar delivers a richly detailed portrait of this rising Gulf nation that cannot be found elsewhere.
Matthew W. Hughey and Emma González-Lesser (eds)
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- January 2021
- ISBN:
- 9781479811076
- eISBN:
- 9781479807826
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- NYU Press
- DOI:
- 10.18574/nyu/9781479811076.001.0001
- Subject:
- Sociology, Culture
This book examines the design (imagining and producing), delivery (distribution, gatekeeping, and cultural mediation), and decoding (reception, consumption, and debate) of varied genres and styles of ...
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This book examines the design (imagining and producing), delivery (distribution, gatekeeping, and cultural mediation), and decoding (reception, consumption, and debate) of varied genres and styles of contemporary racialized media. In line with what the late great media sociologist Stuart Hall called the “circuit of culture,” the authors herein collectively analyze, first, the production side of imagining and encoding ideological meanings and narratives, the material structures, the people involved, and global political economy of media; second, the arena of distribution in which marketing strategies, gatekeeping traditions, laws and policies, and professional customs structure where and how media is framed; and third, the practices of consumption whereby audience receive, interpret, and debate racialized media. Despite pronouncements that we have reached a “postracial” or “colorblind” society or that racial—and racist—meanings are only the domains of extremist activism and political rhetoric, we demonstrate how dominant racial meanings are deployed, negotiated, and contested in the behind-the-scenes productive activity with, distributive processes regarding, and consumer reactions to racialized media. The chapters highlight the multidirectional influences between media, the racialized climate of politics and culture, reverberations of media meanings in society, and experiences of media consumption along the lines of race, class, and gender positionalities. To analyze these complex relationships, contributing authors utilize various forms of media, including film, television, books, newspapers, social media, video games, and comics, among others.Less
This book examines the design (imagining and producing), delivery (distribution, gatekeeping, and cultural mediation), and decoding (reception, consumption, and debate) of varied genres and styles of contemporary racialized media. In line with what the late great media sociologist Stuart Hall called the “circuit of culture,” the authors herein collectively analyze, first, the production side of imagining and encoding ideological meanings and narratives, the material structures, the people involved, and global political economy of media; second, the arena of distribution in which marketing strategies, gatekeeping traditions, laws and policies, and professional customs structure where and how media is framed; and third, the practices of consumption whereby audience receive, interpret, and debate racialized media. Despite pronouncements that we have reached a “postracial” or “colorblind” society or that racial—and racist—meanings are only the domains of extremist activism and political rhetoric, we demonstrate how dominant racial meanings are deployed, negotiated, and contested in the behind-the-scenes productive activity with, distributive processes regarding, and consumer reactions to racialized media. The chapters highlight the multidirectional influences between media, the racialized climate of politics and culture, reverberations of media meanings in society, and experiences of media consumption along the lines of race, class, and gender positionalities. To analyze these complex relationships, contributing authors utilize various forms of media, including film, television, books, newspapers, social media, video games, and comics, among others.
Sun-ha Hong
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- January 2021
- ISBN:
- 9781479860234
- eISBN:
- 9781479855759
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- NYU Press
- DOI:
- 10.18574/nyu/9781479860234.001.0001
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Technology and Society
What counts as knowledge in the age of big data and smart machines? Technologies of datafication renew the long modern promise of turning bodies into facts. They seek to take human intentions, ...
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What counts as knowledge in the age of big data and smart machines? Technologies of datafication renew the long modern promise of turning bodies into facts. They seek to take human intentions, emotions, and behavior and to turn these messy realities into discrete and stable truths. But in pursuing better knowledge, technology is reshaping in its image what counts as knowledge. The push for algorithmic certainty sets loose an expansive array of incomplete archives, speculative judgments, and simulated futures. Too often, data generates speculation as much as it does information. Technologies of Speculation traces this twisted symbiosis of knowledge and uncertainty in emerging state and self-surveillance technologies. It tells the story of vast dragnet systems constructed to predict the next terrorist and of how familiar forms of prejudice seep into the data by the back door. In software placeholders, such as “Mohammed Badguy,” the fantasy of pure data collides with the old specter of national purity. It shows how smart machines for ubiquitous, automated self-tracking, manufacturing knowledge, paradoxically lie beyond the human senses. This data is increasingly being taken up by employers, insurers, and courts of law, creating imperfect proxies through which my truth can be overruled. This book argues that as datafication transforms what counts as knowledge, it is dismantling the long-standing link between knowledge and human reason, rational publics, and free individuals. If data promises objective knowledge, then we must ask in return, Knowledge by and for whom; enabling what forms of life for the human subject?Less
What counts as knowledge in the age of big data and smart machines? Technologies of datafication renew the long modern promise of turning bodies into facts. They seek to take human intentions, emotions, and behavior and to turn these messy realities into discrete and stable truths. But in pursuing better knowledge, technology is reshaping in its image what counts as knowledge. The push for algorithmic certainty sets loose an expansive array of incomplete archives, speculative judgments, and simulated futures. Too often, data generates speculation as much as it does information. Technologies of Speculation traces this twisted symbiosis of knowledge and uncertainty in emerging state and self-surveillance technologies. It tells the story of vast dragnet systems constructed to predict the next terrorist and of how familiar forms of prejudice seep into the data by the back door. In software placeholders, such as “Mohammed Badguy,” the fantasy of pure data collides with the old specter of national purity. It shows how smart machines for ubiquitous, automated self-tracking, manufacturing knowledge, paradoxically lie beyond the human senses. This data is increasingly being taken up by employers, insurers, and courts of law, creating imperfect proxies through which my truth can be overruled. This book argues that as datafication transforms what counts as knowledge, it is dismantling the long-standing link between knowledge and human reason, rational publics, and free individuals. If data promises objective knowledge, then we must ask in return, Knowledge by and for whom; enabling what forms of life for the human subject?
Vaughn A. Booker
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- January 2021
- ISBN:
- 9781479892327
- eISBN:
- 9781479801831
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- NYU Press
- DOI:
- 10.18574/nyu/9781479892327.001.0001
- Subject:
- Religion, Religion and Society
In the twentieth century, jazz professionals became race representatives who also played an important part in shaping the religious landscape of twentieth-century African American Protestantism. They ...
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In the twentieth century, jazz professionals became race representatives who also played an important part in shaping the religious landscape of twentieth-century African American Protestantism. They wielded the power to both define their religious communities and craft novel religious voices and performances. These music celebrities released religious recordings and put on religious concerts, and they became integral to the artistry of African American religious expression. This book argues that with the emergence of new representatives in jazz, religious authority for African Americans found a place and spokespeople in popular culture beyond traditional Afro-Protestant institutions and religious life. It examines jazz musicians’ expressions of belief, practice, and unconventional positions of religious authority. It demonstrates that these jazz professionals enacted theological beliefs and religious practices that echoed, contested with, and diverged from the predominant African American religious culture. The lives and work of Cab Calloway, Duke Ellington, Ella Fitzgerald, and Mary Lou Williams anchor this book’s narrative of racial and religious representations as well as of religious beliefs and practices in the middle decades of the twentieth century. Through these African American jazz women and men, this book illuminates the significant Afro-Protestant cultural presence that informed, surrounded, and opposed their professional and personal lives while also contributing significantly to their artistry. This book’s focus on jazz musicians offers a novel rethinking of African American religious history by bringing the significant artistic dimensions of Afro-Protestant religion into focus as it impacted black popular culture in the twentieth century.Less
In the twentieth century, jazz professionals became race representatives who also played an important part in shaping the religious landscape of twentieth-century African American Protestantism. They wielded the power to both define their religious communities and craft novel religious voices and performances. These music celebrities released religious recordings and put on religious concerts, and they became integral to the artistry of African American religious expression. This book argues that with the emergence of new representatives in jazz, religious authority for African Americans found a place and spokespeople in popular culture beyond traditional Afro-Protestant institutions and religious life. It examines jazz musicians’ expressions of belief, practice, and unconventional positions of religious authority. It demonstrates that these jazz professionals enacted theological beliefs and religious practices that echoed, contested with, and diverged from the predominant African American religious culture. The lives and work of Cab Calloway, Duke Ellington, Ella Fitzgerald, and Mary Lou Williams anchor this book’s narrative of racial and religious representations as well as of religious beliefs and practices in the middle decades of the twentieth century. Through these African American jazz women and men, this book illuminates the significant Afro-Protestant cultural presence that informed, surrounded, and opposed their professional and personal lives while also contributing significantly to their artistry. This book’s focus on jazz musicians offers a novel rethinking of African American religious history by bringing the significant artistic dimensions of Afro-Protestant religion into focus as it impacted black popular culture in the twentieth century.
