designate the possibility of entering a new geological era due to human influence ( Berkhout, 2014 ; Bonneuil and Fressoz, 2016 ), visible traces are no longer mere scratches on the planetary surface. If, given the magnitude of human activities, the challenge is more and more to think about their consequences, it is also useful to explore what imaginative foundations can be used as a basis for collective reflections. From this point of view, science fiction may have the advantage of having anticipated the movement. It has already contributed to displaying these
There is a popular idea about science fiction, that it tells us more about the present than it does the future. Sci-fi in the 1950s was overrun with stories about nuclear apocalypse; in the 80s, body horror provided a potent metaphor for the Aids epidemic. Nowadays, there are countless movies about alien invasion, humanity under threat from a malevolent otherworldly race, a thinly veiled exercise in paranoia about terrorism and immigration. So, what can sci-fi genuinely tell us about the future, and how are we to learn from it, as the article suggests? As
City visions represent shared, and often desirable, expectations about our urban futures. This book explores the history and evolution of city visions, placing them in the wider context of art, culture, science, foresight and urban theory.
It highlights and critically reviews examples of city visions from around the world, contrasting their development and outlining the key benefits and challenges in planning such visions.
The authors show how important it is to think about the future of cities in objective and strategic ways, engaging with a range of stakeholders – something more important than ever as we look to visions of a sustainable future beyond the COVID-19 crisis.
Offering a critical examination of the nature of co-produced research, this important new book draws on materials and case studies from the ESRC funded project ‘Imagine – connecting communities through research’. Outlining a community development approach to co-production, which privileges community agency, the editors link with wider debates about the role of universities within communities. With policy makers in mind, contributors discuss in clear and accessible language what co-production between community groups and academics can achieve. The book will be valuable for practitioners within community contexts, and researchers interested in working with communities, activists, and artists.
As nations reel from the effects of poverty, inequality, climate change and the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic, it feels as though the world has entered a period characterized by pessimism, cynicism and anxiety.
This edited collection challenges individualized understandings of emotion, revealing how they relate to cultural, economic and political realities in difficult times.
Combining numerous empirical studies and theoretical developments from around the world, the diverse contributors explore how dystopian visions of the future influence, and are influenced by, the emotions of an anxious and precarious present.
This is an original investigation into the changing landscape of emotion in dark and uncertain times.
The ‘smart city’ is often promoted as a technology-driven solution to complex urban issues. While commentators are increasingly critical of techno-optimistic narratives, the political imagination is dominated by claims that technical solutions can be uniformly applied to intractable problems.
This book provides a much-needed alternative view, exploring how ‘home-grown’ digital disruption, driven and initiated by local actors, upends the mainstream corporate narrative.
Drawing on original research conducted in a range of urban African settings, Odendaal shows how these initiatives can lead to meaningful change.
This is a valuable resource for scholars working in the intersection of science and technology studies, urban and economic geography and sociology.
There is increasing pressure on the humanities to justify their value and on criminology to undertake interdisciplinary research. In this book, Rafe McGregor establishes a new interdisciplinary methodology, ‘criminological criticism’, harnessing the synergy between literary studies and critical criminology to produce genuine interventions in social reality.
McGregor practices criminological criticism on George Miller’s ‘Mad Max: Fury Road’, Prime Video’s ‘Carnival Row’ and J.K. Rowling’s ‘The Cuckoo’s Calling’, demonstrating how these popular allegories provide insights into the harms of sexism, racism and class prejudice.
This book proposes a model for collaboration between literary studies and critical criminology that is beneficial to the humanities, the social sciences and society.
The concept of transhumanism emerged in the middle of the 20th century, and has influenced discussions around AI, brain–computer interfaces, genetic technologies and life extension. Despite its enduring influence in the public imagination, a fully developed philosophy of transhumanism has not yet been presented.
In this new book, leading philosopher Stefan Lorenz Sorgner explores the critical issues that link transhumanism with digitalization, gene technologies and ethics. He examines the history and meaning of transhumanism and asks bold questions about human perfection, cyborgs, genetically enhanced entities, and uploaded minds.
Offering insightful reflections on values, norms and utopia, this will be an important guide for readers interested in contemporary digital culture, gene ethics, and policy making.
Criminology has been reluctant to embrace fictional narratives as a tool for understanding, explaining and reducing crime and social harm.
In this philosophical enquiry, McGregor uses examples from films, television, novels and graphic novels to demonstrate the extensive criminological potential of fiction around the world. Building on previous studies of non-fiction narratives, the book is the first to explore the ways criminological fiction provides knowledge of the causes of crime and social harm.
For academics, practitioners and students, this is an engaging and thought-provoking critical analysis that establishes a bold new theory of criminological fiction.
Available Open Access under CC-BY-NC licence. Femicide, the killing of women and girls because of their gender, was until recently included in the category ‘homicide’, obscuring the special features of this social and gendered phenomenon. However, the majority of murders of women are perpetrated by men whom they know from family ties and are the result of intimate partner violence or so-called 'honour' killings.
This book is the first one on femicide in Europe and presents the findings of a four-year project discussing various aspects of femicide. Written by leading international scholars with an interdiscplinary perspective, it looks at the prevention programmes and comparative quantitative and qualitative data collection, as well as the impact of culture. It proposes the establishment of a European Observatory on Femicide as a new direction for the future, showing the benefits of cross-national collaboration, united to prevent the murder of women and girls.
