Title: Thing knowledge: a philosophy of scientific instruments
Author: Baird, Davis
Published: University of California Press,  2004
Subjects: Philosophy | Technology and Society
Publisher's Description: Western philosophers have traditionally concentrated on theory as the means for expressing knowledge about a variety of phenomena. This absorbing book challenges this fundamental notion by showing how objects themselves, specifically scientific instruments, can express knowledge. As he considers numerous intriguing examples, Davis Baird gives us the tools to "read" the material products of science and technology and to understand their place in culture. Making a provocative and original challenge to our conception of knowledge itself, Thing Knowledge demands that we take a new look at theories of science and technology, knowledge, progress, and change. Baird considers a wide range of instruments, including Faraday's first electric motor, eighteenth-century mechanical models of the solar system, the cyclotron, various instruments developed by analytical chemists between 1930 and 1960, spectrometers, and more.   [brief]
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Title: Stealing into print: fraud, plagiarism, and misconduct in scientific publishing
Author: LaFollette, Marcel C. (Marcel Chotkowski)
Published: University of California Press,  1992
Subjects: Media Studies | History and Philosophy of Science | Print Media | Public Policy | Science
Publisher's Description: False data published by a psychologist influence policies for treating the mentally retarded. A Nobel Prize-winning molecular biologist resigns the presidency of Rockefeller University in the wake of a scandal involving a co-author accused of fabricating data. A university investigating committee declares that almost half the published articles of a promising young radiologist are fraudulent.Incidents like these strike at the heart of the scientific enterprise and shake the confidence of a society accustomed to thinking of scientists as selfless seekers of truth. Marcel LaFollette's long-awaited book gives a penetrating examination of the world of scientific publishing in which such incidents of misconduct take place. Because influential scientific journals have been involved in the controversies, LaFollette focuses on the fragile "peer review" process - the editorial system of seeking pre-publication opinions from experts. She addresses the cultural glorification of science, which, combined with a scientist's thirst for achievement, can seem to make cheating worth the danger. She describes the great risks taken by the accusers - often scholars of less prestige and power than the accused - whom she calls "nemesis figures" for their relentless dedication to uncovering dishonesty.In sober warning, LaFollette notes that impatient calls from Congress, journalists, and taxpayers for greater accountability from scientists have important implications for the entire system of scientific research and communication.Provocative and learned, Stealing Into Print is certain to become the authoritative work on scientific fraud, invaluable to the scientific community, policy makers, and the general public.   [brief]
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Title: A culture of conspiracy: apocalyptic visions in contemporary America
Author: Barkun, Michael
Published: University of California Press,  2003
Subjects: Politics | Sociology | Christianity | Comparative Religions
Publisher's Description: What do UFO believers, Christian millennialists, and right-wing conspiracy theorists have in common? According to Michael Barkun in this fascinating yet disturbing book, quite a lot. It is well known that some Americans are obsessed with conspiracies. The Kennedy assassination, the Oklahoma City bombing, and the 2001 terrorist attacks have all generated elaborate stories of hidden plots. What is far less known is the extent to which conspiracist worldviews have recently become linked in strange and unpredictable ways with other "fringe" notions such as a belief in UFOs, Nostradamus, and the Illuminati. Unraveling the extraordinary genealogies and permutations of these increasingly widespread ideas, Barkun shows how this web of urban legends has spread among subcultures on the Internet and through mass media, how a new style of conspiracy thinking has recently arisen, and how this phenomenon relates to larger changes in American culture. This book, written by a leading expert on the subject, is the most comprehensive and authoritative examination of contemporary American conspiracism to date. Barkun discusses a range of material - involving inner-earth caves, government black helicopters, alien abductions, secret New World Order cabals, and much more - that few realize exists in our culture. Looking closely at the manifestions of these ideas in a wide range of literature and source material from religious and political literature, to New Age and UFO publications, to popular culture phenomena such as The X-Files, and to websites, radio programs, and more, Barkun finds that America is in the throes of an unrivaled period of millennarian activity. His book underscores the importance of understanding why this phenomenon is now spreading into more mainstream segments of American culture.   [brief]
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Title: Prematurity in scientific discovery: on resistance and neglect
Author: Hook, Ernest B 1936-
Published: University of California Press,  2002
Subjects: Science | History of Science | Social and Political Thought | Geology | Evolution | Physics | History of Medicine
Publisher's Description: For centuries, observers have noted the many obstacles to intellectual change in science. In a much-discussed paper published in Scientific American in 1972, molecular biologist Gunther Stent proposed an explicit criterion for one kind of obstacle to scientific discovery. He denoted a claim or hypothesis as "premature" if its implications cannot be connected to canonical knowledge by a simple series of logical steps. Further, Stent suggested that it was appropriate for the scientific community to ignore such hypotheses so that it would not be overwhelmed by vast numbers of false leads. In this volume, eminent scientists, physicians, historians, social scientists, and philosophers respond to Stent's thesis.   [brief]
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Title: Possessing nature: museums, collecting, and scientific culture in early modern Italy
Author: Findlen, Paula
Published: University of California Press,  1994
Subjects: History | History and Philosophy of Science | European History | Renaissance History
Publisher's Description: In 1500 few Europeans regarded nature as a subject worthy of inquiry. Yet fifty years later the first museums of natural history had appeared in Italy, dedicated to the marvels of nature. Italian patricians, their curiosity fueled by new voyages of exploration and the humanist rediscovery of nature, created vast collections as a means of knowing the world and used this knowledge to their greater glory.Drawing on extensive archives of visitors' books, letters, travel journals, memoirs, and pleas for patronage, Paula Findlen reconstructs the lost social world of Renaissance and Baroque museums. She follows the new study of natural history as it moved out of the universities and into sixteenth- and seventeenth-century scientific societies, religious orders, and princely courts. Findlen argues convincingly that natural history as a discipline blurred the border between the ancients and the moderns, between collecting in order to recover ancient wisdom and the development of new textual and experimental scholarship. Her vivid account reveals how the scientific revolution grew from the constant mediation between the old forms of knowledge and the new.   [brief]
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Title: A scientist's voice in American culture: Simon Newcomb and the rhetoric of scientific method
Author: Moyer, Albert E 1945-
Published: University of California Press,  1992
Subjects: History | History and Philosophy of Science | United States History
Publisher's Description: In late nineteenth-century America, Simon Newcomb was the nation's most celebrated scientist and - irascibly, doggedly, tirelessly - he made the most of it. Officially a mathematical astronomer heading a government agency, Newcomb spent as much of his life out of the observatory as in it, acting as a spokesman for the nascent but restive scientific community of his time.Newcomb saw the "scientific method" as a potential guide for all disciplines and a basis for all practical action, and argued passionately that it was of as much use in the halls of Congress as in the laboratory. In so doing, he not only sparked popular support for American science but also confronted a wide spectrum of social, cultural, and intellectual issues. This first full-length study of Newcomb traces the development of his faith in science and ranges over topics of great public debate in the Gilded Age, from the reform of economic theory to the recasting of the debate between science and religion. Moyer's portrait of a restless, eager mind also illuminates the bustle of late nineteenth-century America.   [brief]
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Title: New world encounters
Author: Greenblatt, Stephen 1943-
Published: University of California Press,  1993
Subjects: Postcolonial Studies | Latin American Studies | Literary Theory and Criticism | Latin American History
Publisher's Description: The discovery of the Indies, wrote Francisco López de Gómara in 1552, was "the greatest event since the creation of the world, excepting the Incarnation and Death of Him who created it." Five centuries have not diminished either the overwhelming importance or the strangeness of the early encounter between Europeans and American peoples. This collection of essays, encompassing history, literary criticism, art history, and anthropology, offers a fresh and innovative approach to the momentous encounter.   [brief]
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Title: The Gorbachev phenomenon: a historical interpretation
Author: Lewin, Moshe 1921-
Published: University of California Press,  1991
Subjects: History | European History | Sociology | Politics | Russian and Eastern European Studies
Publisher's Description: The "Gorbachev phenomenon" is seen as the product of complex developments during the last seventy years - developments that changed the Soviet Union from a primarily agrarian society into an urban, industrial one. Here, for the first time, a noted authority on Soviet society identifies the crucial h . . . [more]
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Title: The lure of the modern: writing modernism in semicolonial China, 1917-1937
Author: Shi, Shumei 1961-
Published: University of California Press,  2001
Subjects: Literature | China | Asian Literature | Asian History | Cultural Anthropology | Postcolonial Studies | Japan | Comparative Literature | Literary Theory and Criticism
Publisher's Description: Shu-mei Shih's study is the first book in English to offer a comprehensive account of Chinese literary modernism from Republican China. In The Lure of the Modern, Shih argues for the contextualization of Chinese modernism in the semicolonial cultural and political formation of the time. Engaging critically with theories of modernism, postcoloniality, and global and local cultural studies, Shih analyzes pivotal issues - such as psychoanalysis, decadence, Orientalism, Occidentalism, semicolonial subjectivity, cosmopolitanism, and urbanism - that were mediated by Japanese as well as Western modernisms.   [brief]
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Title: Crossing the border: encounters between homeless people and outreach workers
Author: Rowe, Michael 1947-
Published: University of California Press,  1999
Subjects: Sociology | Anthropology | Psychology | American Studies | Urban Studies | Social Problems | Anthropology
Publisher's Description: The relationship between the homeless and the social service community marks a border where the disenfranchised meet the mainstream of society. Crossing the Border , the first book-length study of outreach work to the mentally ill homeless, uses ethnographic tools to examine encounters at this border. Michael Rowe provides a rich picture not only of a particular group of homeless people, but also of the complicated interactions between the marginalized and those who try to help them. As it examines both the dilemmas and opportunities of outreach work to the mentally ill homeless, this compelling study asks us to consider the broader questions about how we relate to the poor and other marginal persons at the border of society.The author's personal encounters with the homeless as Director of the New Haven ACCESS outreach project, his interviews with fifty homeless persons for this study, and his numerous interviews with outreach staff, provide an invaluable personal perspective. In this study, Rowe draws a collective portrait of the homeless whom he interviewed and observed, discusses the outreach workers in depth, examines transactions from the perspective of each party, and finally, places these encounters within the social and institutional contexts that shape them.Rowe's writing is accessible and punctuated with many vivid anecdotes. As Crossing the Border shows, encounters between the homeless and outreach workers represent a measure of where we will set our social boundaries and what standard of living we will accept for those who live at that boundary.   [brief]
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Title: On the edge of America: California modernist art, 1900-1950 
Author: Karlstrom, Paul J
Published: University of California Press,  1996
Subjects: Art | Art History | California and the West | United States History | Californian and Western History
Publisher's Description: To many, California's social and cultural identity has set it apart from the rest of the nation. Identified almost exclusively with Hollywood and popular culture, the entire region has been denied a meaningful relationship to mainstream twentieth-century modernism. This groundbreaking collection emphatically challenges that assumption. In essays about California art during the first half of the century, the contributors evoke a culture, now recognizable as modernist, that reflects the actual circumstances of contemporary West Coast artistic experience in all its richness. The subjects include painting, murals, sculpture, film, photography, and architecture.The issue of regionalism is central to this remarkable collection. How do we build a cultural portrait of an area that reveals its distinctive character while recognizing its participation in the larger art historical framework? Through the essays runs the theme of an alternative culture that transformed modernism to suit its own regional imperatives. Compelled by a sense of distance and the need for reinvention, California artists created traditions for a new cultural landscape and society. On the Edge of America is an enlightening and visually exciting addition to the growing literature on California art and culture. Through its fresh and expanded view of modernism, it is also well suited to the formulation of a truly national cultural narrative, one that embraces the edges as well as the center of American creative life.   [brief]
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Title: Beyond the pale: the Jewish encounter with late imperial Russia
Author: Nathans, Benjamin
Published: University of California Press,  2002
Subjects: History | Jewish Studies | Russian and Eastern European Studies
Publisher's Description: A surprising number of Jews lived, literally and figuratively, "beyond the Pale" of Jewish Settlement in tsarist Russia during the half-century before the Revolution of 1917. Thanks to the availability of long-closed Russian archives, along with a wide range of other sources, Benjamin Nathans reinterprets the history of the Russian-Jewish encounter. In the wake of Russia's "Great Reforms," Nathans writes, a policy of selective integration stimulated social and geographic mobility among the empire's Jews. The reaction that culminated, toward the turn of the century, in ethnic restrictions on admission to universities, the professions, and other institutions of civil society reflected broad anxieties that Russians were being placed at a disadvantage in their own empire. Nathans's conclusions about the effects of selective integration and the Russian-Jewish encounter during this formative period will be of great interest to all students of modern Jewish and modern Russian history.   [brief]
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Title: Regulatory encounters: multinational corporations and American adversarial legalism 
Author: Axelrad, Lee 1963-
Published: University of California Press,  2000
Subjects: Politics | Public Policy | Law
Publisher's Description: Regulatory Encounters reports on a path-breaking study of how government regulation of business in the United States differs in practice from regulation in other economically advanced democracies. In each of ten in-depth case studies, the contributors to this volume compare a particular multinational corporation's experience with parallel regulatory regimes in the United States and in Japan, Canada, Great Britain, Germany, The Netherlands, and the European Union, noting precisely which regulatory precautions were actually implemented in each country. The regulatory systems analyzed include aspects of environmental protection, product safety, debt collection, employees' rights, and patent protection. The studies in Regulatory Encounters indicate that the adversarial and legalistic character of American regulation imposes higher costs and delays on economic activity than comparable regulatory regimes in other economically advanced democracies, and often does not generate higher levels of protection for the public.   [brief]
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Title: The social edges of psychoanalysis
Author: Smelser, Neil J
Published: University of California Press,  1999
Subjects: Sociology | Social Theory | Psychology
Publisher's Description: For several decades the writings of sociologist Neil J. Smelser have won him a vast and admiring audience across several disciplines. Best known for his work on social movements, economic sociology, and British social history, Smelser's psychoanalytic writings are less familiar to his readers. In fact, many people are completely unaware of Smelser's formal psychoanalytic training and ongoing counseling practice. With the publication of The Social Edges of Psychoanalysis , Smelser's thought-provoking essays on psychoanalytic concepts are finally brought together in one book.Psychoanalytic theory has had an ambivalent relationship with sociology, and these essays explore that ambivalence, providing arguments about how and why psychoanalytic approaches can deepen the sociological perspective. One of Smelser's main tenets is that human social behavior always contains both social-structural and social-psychological elements, and that psychoanalytic theory can bridge these two dimensions of human social life. Many of the issues Smelser addresses - including interdisciplinarity, the macro-micro link in research, masculinity and violence, and affirmative action - have generated considerable scholarly interest.This collection paves the way for further articulation of the relationship between sociology and psychoanalysis at a time when many sociologists are looking for interdisciplinary links in their work. Presented with clarity and grace, and free of the murkiness often found in both sociological and psychoanalytic writing, Smelser's new book will excite reflection and research on the less visible dynamics of social existence.   [brief]
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Title: Encounter: a novel of nineteenth-century Korea
Author: Han, Mu-suk 1918-
Published: University of California Press,  1992
Subjects: Literature | Literature in Translation | Asian Literature | South Asia
Publisher's Description: This historical novel, Encounter ( Mannam ), by Hahn Moo-Sook, one of Asia's most honored writers, is a story of the resilience in the Korean spirit. It is told through the experiences of Tasan, a high-ranking official and foremost Neo-Confucian scholar at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Because of Tasan's fascination with Western learning, then synonymous with Catholicism, he is exiled to a remote province for 18 years. In banishment he meets people from various social and religious backgrounds - Buddhist monks, peasants, shamans - whom he would not otherwise have met. The events of Tasan's life are effectively used to depict the confluence of Buddhist, Neo-Confucian, Taoist, and shamanistic beliefs in traditional Korea.A subplot involves three young sisters, the daughters of a prominent Catholic aristocrat, and affords the reader vivid glimpses into Yi-dynasty women's lives, particularly those of palace ladies, scholars' wives, tavern keepers, shamans, and slaves. In contrast to the long-held Confucian stereotype of female subservience, this story illustrates the richness of women's contribution to Korean culture and tradition. Encounter' s detailed narrative provides a broad and informed view of nineteenth-century Korea, making it a highly useful book for courses on Korean literature and society. It will also be an engaging read for lovers of historical fiction.   [brief]
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Title: Over the edge: remapping the American West 
Author: Matsumoto, Valerie J
Published: University of California Press,  1999
Subjects: American Studies | California and the West | Popular Culture | History | United States History | Californian and Western History | German Studies
Publisher's Description: From the Gold Rush to rush hour, the history of the American West is fraught with diverse, subversive, and at times downright eccentric elements. This provocative volume challenges traditional readings of western history and literature, and redraws the boundaries of the American West with absorbing essays ranging widely on topics from tourism to immigration, from environmental battles to interethnic relations, and from law to film. Taken together, the essays reassess the contributions of a diverse and multicultural America to the West, as they link western issues to global frontiers.Featuring the latest work by some of the best new writers both inside and outside academia, the original essays in Over the Edge confront the traditional field of western American studies with a series of radical, speculative, and sometimes outrageous challenges. The collection reads the West through Ben-Hur and the films of Mae West; revises the western American literary canon to include the works of African American and Mexican American writers; examines the implications of miscegenation law and American Indian blood quantum requirements; and brings attention to the historical participation of Mexican and Japanese American women, Native American slaves, and Alaskan cannery workers in community life.   [brief]
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Title: Fear at the edge: state terror and resistance in Latin America
Author: Corradi, Juan E 1943-
Published: University of California Press,  1992
Subjects: Latin American Studies | Politics | Sociology
Publisher's Description: Despite the emergence of fragile democracies in Latin America in the 1980s, a legacy of fear and repression haunts this region. This provocative volume chronicles the effect of systematic state terror on the social fabric in Chile, Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay from the 1960s to the mid-1980s.The contributors, primarily Latin American scholars, examine the deep sense of insecurity and the complex social psychology of people who live in authoritarian regimes. There is Argentina, where the brutal repression of the 1976 coup almost completely smothered individuals who might once have opposed government practices, and Uruguay, where the government forced the population into neutrality and isolation and cast a silent pall on everyday life. Accounts of repression and resistance in Chile and Brazil are also vividly presented. The denial and rationalization by citizens in all four countries can only be understood in the context of the generalized fear and confusion created by the violent military campaigns, which included abductions, torture, and disappearances of alleged terrorists.The recent transition to civilian rule in these countries has spotlighted their powerful legacy of fear. These important essays reveal disturbing insights into how fear is generated, legitimized, accommodated, and resisted among people living under totalitarian rule.   [brief]
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Title: MeXicana encounters: the making of social identities on the borderlands
Author: Fregoso, Rosa Linda
Published: University of California Press,  2003
Subjects: Sociology | Chicano Studies | California and the West | Film | Women's Studies | Literary Theory and Criticism | Latin American Studies | American Studies
Publisher's Description: meXicana Encounters charts the dynamic and contradictory representation of Mexicanas and Chicanas in culture. Rosa Linda Fregoso's deft analysis of the cultural practices and symbolic forms that shape social identities takes her across a wide and varied terrain. Among the subjects she considers are the recent murders and disappearances of women in Ciudad Juárez; transborder feminist texts that deal with private, domestic forms of violence; how films like John Sayles's Lone Star re-center white masculinity; and the significance of la familia to the identity of Chicanas/os and how it can subordinate gender and sexuality to masculinity and heterosexual roles. Fregoso's self-reflexive approach to cultural politics embraces the movement for social justice and offers new insights into the ways that racial and gender differences are inscribed in cultural practices.   [brief]
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Title: Epic encounters: culture, media, and U.S. interests in the Middle East, 1945-2000
Author: McAlister, Melani 1962-
Published: University of California Press,  2001
Subjects: American Studies | United States History | Middle Eastern History | Popular Culture | Middle Eastern Studies | Ethnic Studies | Religion
Publisher's Description: In the last half of the twentieth century, cultural products--from films and news reports to museum exhibits and novels--profoundly shaped ideas about the relationship between Americans and the Middle East. In this innovative book, Melani McAlister explores the cultural history of political interests, arguing that U.S. encounters with the Middle East were influenced by both the presence of oil and the religious symbolism of the region. McAlister's richly textured study shows how culture functions as a social and historical force in shaping politics and identity. She skillfully weaves lively and accessible readings of popular culture with a rigorous analysis of U.S. foreign policy and the domestic politics of race. McAlister begins by situating the postwar development of U.S.-Middle East relations, including the rise of anticolonialism and the establishment of the state of Israel. Subsequent chapters consider specific events and cultural texts such as the epic film The Ten Commandments, the King Tut museum exhibit, writings from the Black arts movement, the U.S.-Iranian hostage crisis, and the 1990-1991 Gulf War. In each of these cases, McAlister demonstrates how representations of the Middle East have been a site of struggle over both the nature of U.S. foreign policy and the construction of race, religion, and gender within the United States. Truly interdisciplinary, this work will appeal to a wide audience as it illuminates the significant intersection of culture and politics that is at the heart of both nationalism and globalization.   [brief]
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Title: At the heart of the Empire: Indians and the colonial encounter in late-Victorian Britain 
Author: Burton, Antoinette M 1961-
Published: University of California Press,  1998
Subjects: History | Women's Studies | Autobiographies and Biographies | South Asia | Victorian History | Travel | European History | Asian History
Publisher's Description: Antoinette Burton focuses on the experiences of three Victorian travelers in Britain to illustrate how "Englishness" was made and remade in relation to imperialism. The accounts left by these three sojourners - all prominent, educated Indians - represent complex, critical ethnographies of "native" metropolitan society and offer revealing glimpses of what it was like to be a colonial subject in fin-de-siècle Britain. Burton's innovative interpretation of the travelers' testimonies shatters the myth of Britain's insularity from its own construction of empire and shows that it was instead a terrain open to continual contest and refiguration.Burton's three subjects felt the influence of imperial power keenly during even the most everyday encounters in Britain. Pandita Ramabai arrived in London in 1883 seeking a medical education and left in 1886, having resisted the Anglican Church's attempts to make her an evangelical missionary. Cornelia Sorabji went to Oxford to study law and became the first Indian woman to be called to the Bar. Behramji Malabari sought help for his Indian reform projects in England, and subjected London to colonial scrutiny in the process. Their experiences form the basis of this wide-ranging, clearly written, and imaginative investigation of diasporic movement in the colonial metropolis.   [brief]
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