GEOG 103 - Human Geography: Culture

The numerous tasks and routines that shape our daily existence can seem mundane, even invisible--and yet they play an extremely powerful role in structuring and reproducing society. Exploring Everyday Life casts light on these so-called trivialities, serving as both a guide to the invisible world of the everyday and an instruction manual for first-time explorers. Ehn, Lofgren, and Wilk demonstrate how to use a broad array of ethnographic tools to discover, map, and document new and unexplored territories and guide readers through the process of cultural analysis. Their concrete examples shed light on how a study or paper assignment can evolve and point to how cultural analysis of everyday life can be practically applied in business, government, and other arenas outside of academia.

At a time when fundamental concerns about social justice, sustainability, economic justice, and cultural diversity continue to be relegated to the sidelines of the mainstream development agenda, Feminist Futures is more essential than ever.   This revised and updated edition collects leading academics and a new generation of activists and scholars to provide fresh perspectives on how women in the Global South tranform our understanding of development. With essays ranging across Africa, Asia, and the Americas, it reveals how development efforts have repeatedly failed the Third World and illuminates the complex ways in which women continue to resist attempts to marginalize and subordinate them. Bringing together cultural studies, development studies, and feminist theory, contributors articulate an innovative framework for understanding connections between women, culture, and development, applying it to everything from sexuality to the environment, technology, and the cultural politics of representation.   Straddling disciplines and continents, Feminist Futures interweaves scholarship and social activism for a fascinating exploration of evolving positions of women in the Global South and an urgent demand for rethinking development approaches in the twenty-first century.

"One of the most exciting developments from the world of ideas in decades, presented with panache by two frighteningly brilliant, endearingly unpretentious, and endlessly creative young scientists." -- Steven Pinker, author of The Better Angels of Our Nature Our society has gone from writing snippets of information by hand to generating a vast flood of 1s and 0s that record almost every aspect of our lives: who we know, what we do, where we go, what we buy, and who we love. This year, the world will generate 5 zettabytes of data. (That's a five with twenty-one zeros after it.) Big data is revolutionizing the sciences, transforming the humanities, and renegotiating the boundary between industry and the ivory tower. What is emerging is a new way of understanding our world, our past, and possibly, our future. In Uncharted , Erez Aiden and Jean-Baptiste Michel tell the story of how they tapped into this sea of information to create a new kind of telescope: a tool that, instead of uncovering the motions of distant stars, charts trends in human history across the centuries. By teaming up with Google, they were able to analyze the text of millions of books. The result was a new field of research and a scientific tool, the Google Ngram Viewer, so groundbreaking that its public release made the front page of The New York Times , The Wall Street Journal , and The Boston Globe , and so addictive that Mother Jones called it "the greatest timewaster in the history of the internet." Using this scope, Aiden and Michel--and millions of users worldwide--are beginning to see answers to a dizzying array of once intractable questions. How quickly does technology spread? Do we talk less about God today? When did people start "having sex" instead of "making love"? At what age do the most famous people become famous? How fast does grammar change? Which writers had their works most effectively censored by the Nazis? When did the spelling "donut" start replacing the venerable "doughnut"? Can we predict the future of human history? Who is better known--Bill Clinton or the rutabaga? All over the world, new scopes are popping up, using big data to quantify the human experience at the grandest scales possible. Yet dangers lurk in this ocean of 1s and 0s--threats to privacy and the specter of ubiquitous government surveillance. Aiden and Michel take readers on a voyage through these uncharted waters.