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E-book Practices of Speculation : Modeling, Embodiment, Figuration

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Penilaian

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May 2020. As we write this introduction, the covid-19 pandemic has covered the world. Drastic political measures to contain the virus have followed, appearing already belated and inadequate even as they envision a future after the current crisis. With notable national and regional differences, the policies and practices implemented to deal with the spread of the virus act like magnifying glasses, illu-minating the social and economic power relations of the Global North and Global South more clearly than ever before, while also highlighting the fissures and ten-sions where things may fall apart entirely. The most conspicuous of these breaking points include, for example, the insistent growth paradigm of neoliberal econom-ics; the processes of transnationalization and re-bordering; the evolving role of spatial proximity for social networks and personal relationships, now articulated through the clumsy expression of “social distancing”; the preservation of civil lib-erties in the midst of massive data collection and surveillance; the relationship between science and politics; and the increasingly significant role of digital media and software platforms for civic participation and cultural belonging. Not least, the pandemic has reconfigured social, political, and ecological temporalities, pro-voking at the same time the invocation of past events, manifold scenarios of fu-ture developments, and calls for immediate action—often coexisting in different contexts. These responses endow the ongoing debate around climate change with a new sense of urgency, even while they tend to eclipse it. This is a moment of cri-sis writ large, and its heightened uncertainties force us to suspend any illusions of autonomy to fully face the vulnerabilities of ourselves and our life-supporting systems. The future has opened up in radically novel ways, and the speculative practices that give this volume its title become manifestly relevant. As governments, health experts, companies, and investors struggle to gain control over a highly complex, already destructive situation, acts of speculation—particularly in the domains of economics and technoscience—are ubiquitous and proliferating. These speculations often take the form of colorful visualizations of data, for example, extrapolative maps and charts that appeal to the power of sci-entific evidence. But they also frequently latch onto apocalyptic, dystopian, and utopian narrative traditions, highlighting the need for an interdisciplinary re-sponse. Even before the current pandemic, interdisciplinary scholarship has am-ply shown how viruses and other contagious entities animate scientific, political, literary, and popular media discourses in a peculiarly speculative manner.1 To d a y, engulfed in discrepant narratives of the pandemic, social media and television broadcasts abound with claims of “fake news” and conspiracy theories, even while reporting the risk assessments and predictive models of scientific, economic, and political authorities. Virologists and epidemiologists have become the leading experts of the day, making the basic operational modes of scientific knowledge more visible than ever. However, the speculative dimensions of their response to covid-19 underscore the stark, inexorable force of uncertainty, even as we turn to science for certain answers. The current volume is grounded in this premise: as a field of practices oriented towards the future, speculation runs on non-knowl-edge and uncertainty to produce new knowledge. Yet even as it turns to the future, speculation is bound to existing knowledge and, as such, belongs as much to his-tory as to any eventual world to come.

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Ketersediaan

Informasi Detail

Judul Seri

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No. Panggil

800 COR p

Penerbit

Germany : transcript Verlag., 2021

Deskripsi Fisik

285 hlm

Bahasa

English

ISBN/ISSN

9783839447512

Klasifikasi

800

Tipe Isi

text

Tipe Media

computer

Tipe Pembawa

online resource

Edisi

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Subjek

Literature

Info Detail Spesifik

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Pernyataan Tanggungjawab

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Versi lain/terkait

Lampiran Berkas

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