Bodies of Knowledge: An Anatomy and Kinesiology of the American Prison Nation, \u27Human\u27-making, and Twenty-first-century Techno-gods

The social production of hegemonic knowledge has historically been legitimized in relation to the sanctioned status of the ‘Human’.[1] Beginning with the American Prison Industrial Complex and what sociologist Beth E. Richie conceptualizes as the “prison nation,” I will show the ‘human’ as a contingent and composite status appearing along a spectrum of Flesh, Body, and ‘Human’ (Flesh-Body-‘Human’) statuses and subjectivity. Bringing this ‘Human’ continuum into conversation with twenty-first-century media, (micro)computational technologies, and contemporary knowledge and social economies, I expand the notion, reach, and scale of the American “prison nation.” Following Mark Hansen’s treatment of twenty-first-century digital media, I posit that the contemporary, technologically mediated and “datafied” prison nation,[2] like digital media, performs a further displacement of the ‘Human’ as “the privileged arbiter of experience.”[3] This displacement has various effects which I explore in terms of what I call a techno-apotheosis in the advent of techno-gods. I propose that subjectivity is affected and should be rethought in terms of networked assemblages of subject positions and thing positions, or ‘human’ selves and thing selves.[4] With this, a technologically mediated and transnationally competitive economy of the ‘Human’ emerges. (Re)produced as it is circulated through social institutions of neoliberal, law-and-order governance, this globalizing ‘Human’ economy situates each social entity—human and other-than-human, organic and inorganic, material and immaterial—within relational, networked, epistemological and ontological continua operational as the twenty-first-century “datafied” “prison nation.” [1] Throughout, I am deploying Brian Massumi’s conceptualization of the “social” as an articulation of the cofunctioning of the cultural, political and economic, and which, following Gilles Deleuze among others, includes human and nonhuman, organic and inorganic, material and immaterial entities and processes as efficacious actants within these enmeshed spheres. [2] For Patricia Ticineto Clough and Mark Hansen “datafication” refers to the full digital landscape of data analysis and computation the scale and capacity of which is unprecedented. This digital landscape includes ‘big-data’, data mining, tracking, surveillance, capture, and affect-based ‘predictive’, anticipatory, biometric, and environmental measure and modulation at unprecedented scales of molecular and molar ‘visibility’ and ‘sense-ability’. [3] See Mark Hansen’s work, Feed-Forward: On the Future of Twenty-First-Century Media (Hansen 50-52). [4] For a rich engagement with thingness see Patricia Ticineto Clough’s forthcoming Introduction to The User Unconscious, which picks up and expands Sue Grand’s work on trauma and split subjectivity in “Unsexed and Ungendered Bodies: The Violated Self,” 2003

Changing Nature of the Food Security Challenge: Implications for Agricultural Research

Text of the Sir John Crawford Memorial Lecture delivered by M. S. Swaminathan at CGIAR International Centers Week, October-November 1990. Swaminathan addressed some of the emerging challenges in agricultural research and public policy resulting from the changing nature of the food security challenge

Saline Agriculture for Irrigated Land in Pakistan: A Handbook

Farm Management,

Picturing urban subterranea: embodied aesthetics of London’s sewers

As cities around the world are tunnelled and hollowed to new depths, geographers are giving increasing attention to infrastructure in the context of verticality, often framed through urban planning or geopolitics. This paper responds to calls from geography and the wider geohumanities for ethnographic and aesthetic consideration of vertical infrastructures by reflecting on London’s sewer system as a site of embodied engagement and creative imagination. Once venerated by the press and public as engineering, medical and aesthetic triumphs, London’s sewers are thought to have morphed into sites of ubiquitous obscurity. This paper counters this understanding by considering bodies, technologies and activities through time that have shaped imaginations of London’s main drainage, including the work of contemporary urban explorers. I argue that although the current aestheticization of infrastructural spaces in London is connected to particular technologies, politics and geographical concerns of the present, it also echoes bodyspace interventions and affects across a 150-year span. This aesthetic legacy is a crucial pillar in our understandings of urban verticality

Walking with the earth : intercultural perspectives on ethics of ecological caring

It is commonly believed that considering nature different from us, human beings (qua rational, cultural, religious and social actors), is detrimental to our engagement for the preservation of nature. An obvious example is animal rights, a deep concern for all living beings, including non-human living creatures, which is understandable only if we approach nature, without fearing it, as something which should remain outside of our true home. “Walking with the earth” aims at questioning any similar preconceptions in the wide sense, including allegoric-poetic contributions. We invited 14 authors from 4 continents to express all sorts of ways of saying why caring is so important, why togetherness, being-with each others, as a spiritual but also embodied ethics is important in a divided world

Celebrating Economies of Change: Brave Visions for Inclusive Futures

This issue has been inspired by a path-breaking conference held by the Canadian Society for Ecologi-cal Economics (CANSEE), which took place this past May 2019 in Waterloo, Ontario. Entitled Engaging Economies of Change, the conference aimed to ex-pand existing research networks in the economy-environment nexus by building connections beyond the academy in order to meaningfully engage with the practicalities of building and implementing change. This issue captures the rich content shared during the event, as well as descriptions of the pro-cesses and efforts made to create a welcoming and respectful space where academics and community activists could build alliances and discuss common challenges. The conference organizers – all graduate students and activists themselves -- called this ‘building a brave space’.This research was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canad

Forensic Analysis

It is my pleasure to place before you the book ''Forensic Analysis - From Death to Justice'' which presents one of the major portions of the broad specialty of Forensic Science comprising mainly of Thanatology and Criminalistics. This book has been designed to incorporate a wide range of new ideas and unique works from all authors from topics like Forensic Engineering, Forensic Entomology and Crime Scene Investigation. I hope that it will be useful to practitioners of forensic medicine, experts, pathologists, law makers, investigating authorities, undergraduate and postgraduate medical school graduates of medicine

Attic Salt, 2020

https://digitalcommons.lmu.edu/atticsaltlmu/1006/thumbnail.jp

Semper floreat

Title varies: Gamut; Time off: Semper; The press. Numbering system very erratic