Creating Future People offers readers a fast-paced primer on how advances in genetics will enable parents to influence the traits of their children, including their children’s intelligence, moral capacities, physical appearance, and immune system. It explains the science of gene editing and embryo selection and motivates the moral questions it raises by thinking about the strategic aspects of…
Yet Brown’s family lived in Kirkhale, in Northumberland, a fairly typical small rural community, over 300 miles to the north, far from the glittering metropolitan world. His father, who died in 1720 when Brown was only four, was a farmer and land agent to the local lord, Sir William Loraine, yet the young Brown was educated at the local school in Cambo – possibly through the good offices of…
Algorithms have risen to become one, if not the central technology for producing, circulating, and evaluating knowledge in multiple societal arenas. In this book, scholars from the social sciences, humanities, and computer science argue that this shift has, and will continue to have, profound implications for how knowledge is produced and what and whose knowledge is valued and deemed valid. To …
When we think about equality in the city, we are very likely to think first of the wide and growing divide between rich and poor, in material terms. Yet when we think more about a 'city of equals' it becomes apparent that how people feel treated by the city and those around them, and whether they can live according to their values, are much more central. Accordingly, combining their own reflect…
The dynamic processes of knowledge production in archaeology and elsewhere in the humanities and social sciences are increasingly viewed as the collaborative effort of groups, clusters and communities of researchers rather than the isolated work of so-called ‘instrumental’ actors. Shifting focus from the individual scholar to the wider social contexts of her work and the dynamic creative pr…
Fifteen years ago, historians of the Roman world were in the process of dismantling the hierarchical structure of their subject that had endured since the beginning of scholarly discourse about the Roman Empire. In the late sixties and early seventies, scholars began to move away from work concentrating on the dominant social and political group that had produced the bulk of the surviving liter…
According to the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO), there was a steady increase of fish catches until the middle of the 1990s when the catch began to level off (Fig. 1.1). Recent work by Watson and Pauly (2001) has shown that in reality the total marine catch of fish has been declining by some 10% a year since 1988. The apparent continued increase until the mid1990s was du…
n an age where history is a global battleground and fake news proliferates, culture wars are being waged across India over its future – majoritarian or inclusive, neoliberal or socialist, religious or secular? Fake Gods and False History takes us to the BDD Chawls, a central Mumbai neighbourhood of tenement blocks (chawls) on the brink of a controversial redevelopment. Throughout the book, …
his book examines the pivotal role that silver and gold money played in the formation and working out of England’s Amer-ican colonial proj ect in the seventeenth century. The book argues, first, that money was the primum mobile, or prime mover, of En glish imperial action and overseas activity, including the impulse for colonization, the regulation of colonial trade, and the introduction…
In 1939 Martinican writer Aimé Césaire first published his book length poem variously translated as Notebook of a Return to My Native Land, Return to My Native Land, or Journal of a Homecom-ing, in which this epigraph appears. As the colonial powers were taking the world into an era of mass destruction, Césaire drew upon a Caribbean imaginary to counterpose to th…