The technological capacity to transform biology - repairing, reshaping and replacing body parts, chemicals and functions – is now part of our lives. Humanity is confronted with a variety of affordable and non-invasive 'enhancement technologies': anti-ageing medicine, aesthetic surgery, cognitive and sexual enhancers, lifestyle drugs, prosthetics and hormone supplements. This collection focuses on why people find these practices so seductive and provides ethnographic insights into people’s motives and aspirations as they embrace or reject enhancement technologies, which are closely entangled with negotiations over gender, class, age, nationality and ethnicity.

How artists at the turn of the twentieth century broke with traditional ways of posing the bodies of human figures to reflect modern understandings of human consciousness. With this book, Emmelyn Butterfield-Rosen brings a new formal and conceptual rubric to the study of turn-of-the-century modernism, transforming our understanding of the era’s canonical works. Butterfield-Rosen analyzes a hitherto unexamined formal phenomenon in European art: how artists departed from conventions for posing the human figure that had long been standard. In the decades around 1900, artists working in different countries and across different media began to present human figures in strictly frontal, lateral, and dorsal postures. The effect, both archaic and modern, broke with the centuries-old tradition of rendering bodies in torsion, with poses designed to simulate the human being’s physical volume and capacity for autonomous thought and movement. This formal departure destabilized prevailing visual codes for signifying the existence of the inner life of the human subject. Exploring major works by Georges Seurat, Gustav Klimt, and the dancer and choreographer Vaslav Nijinsky— replete with new archival discoveries—Modern Art and the Remaking of Human Disposition combines intensive formal analysis with inquiries into the history of psychology and evolutionary biology. In doing so, it shows how modern understandings of human consciousness and the relation of mind to body were materialized in art through a new vocabulary of postures and poses.

'A work of remarkable scope' - Guardian FT Best science books of 2018 Primate Change has been adapted into a radio series for the BBC WORLD SERVICE. * This is the road from climate change to primate change. PRIMATE CHANGE is a wide-ranging, polemical look at how and why the human body has changed since humankind first got up on two feet. Spanning the entirety of human history - from primate to transhuman - Vybarr Cregan-Reid's book investigates where we came from, who we are today and how modern technology will change us beyond recognition. In the last two hundred years, humans have made such a tremendous impact on the world that our geological epoch is about to be declared the 'Anthropocene', or the Age of Man. But while we have been busy changing the shape of the world we inhabit, the ways of living that we have been building have, as if under the cover of darkness, been transforming our bodies and altering the expression of our DNA, too. Primate Change beautifully unscrambles the complex architecture of our modern human bodies, built over millions of years and only starting to give up on us now. 'Our bodies are in a shock. Modern living is as bracing to the human body as jumping through a hole in the ice. Our bodies do not know what century they were born into and they are defending and deforming themselves in response.'

In the mid-1990s, civil war and genocide ravaged Rwanda. Since then, the country’s new leadership has undertaken a highly ambitious effort to refashion Rwanda’s politics, economy, and society, and the country’s accomplishments have garnered widespread praise. Remaking Rwanda is the first book to examine Rwanda’s remarkable post-genocide recovery in a comprehensive and critical fashion. By paying close attention to memory politics, human rights, justice, foreign relations, land use, education, and other key social institutions and practices, this volume raises serious concerns about the depth and durability of the country’s reconstruction. Edited by Scott Straus and Lars Waldorf, Remaking Rwanda brings together experienced scholars and human rights professionals to offer a nuanced, historically informed picture of post-genocide Rwanda—one that reveals powerful continuities with the nation’s past and raises profound questions about its future. Best Special Interest Books, selected by the American Association of School Librarians Best Special Interest Books, selected by the Public Library Reviewers

An interdisciplinary effort of scholars from history, women's studies, and family and consumer sciences, Remaking Home Economics covers the field's history of opening career opportunities for women and responding to domestic and social issues. Calls to "bring back home economics" miss the point that it never went away, say Sharon Y. Nickols and Gwen Kay--home economics has been remaking itself, in study and practice, for more than a century. These new essays, relevant for a variety of fields--history, women's studies, STEM, and family and consumer sciences itself--take both current and historical perspectives on defining issues including home economics philosophy, social responsibility, and public outreach; food and clothing; gender and race in career settings; and challenges to the field's identity and continuity. Home economics history offers a rich case study for exploring common ground between the broader culture and this highly gendered profession. This volume describes the resourcefulness of past scholars and professionals who negotiated with cultural and institutional constraints to produce their work, as well as the innovations of contemporary practitioners who continue to change the profession, including its name and identity. The widespread urge to reclaim domestic skills, along with a continual need for fresh ways to address obesity, elder abuse, household debt, and other national problems affirms the field's vitality and relevance. This volume will foster dialogue both inside and outside the academy about the changes that have remade (and are remaking) family and consumer sciences.

A leading geneticist explores the "brave new world" of baby-making in an age that looks onward from IVF and surrogacy to human clones and genetic engineering. Lee Silver explains the science of embryology, explores what science can and will be able to do to affect the natural processes, and through a series of individual stories, both contemporary and imagined from the future, looks at the moral, ethical and legal implications.

This book highlights the increasingly important contribution of geographical theory to the understanding of social change, values, economic & political organization and ethical imperatives. As a cohesive collection of chapters from well-known geographers in Britain and North America, it reflects the aims of the contributors in striving to bridge the gap between the historical-materialist and humanist interpretations of human geography. The book deals with both the contemporary issues outlined above and the situation in which they emerge: industrial restructuring, planning, women s issues, social and cultural practices and the landscape as context for social action. "

Did you know that about 40 percent of the world's population lives without toilets? That's more than two billion people, most of whom live in rural areas or crowded urban slums. And according to the World Health Organization, diseases spread by the lack of basic sanitation kill more people every year than all forms of violence, including war. In particular, diarrheal diseases kill more than two million people each year, most of them children. Everyone needs to go to the bathroom, and from the citizens of the world's earliest human settlements to astronauts living on the International Space Station, the challenge has been the same: how to safely and effectively dispose of human body wastes. Toilet history includes everything from the hunt for the causes of infectious disease to twenty-first-century marvels of engineering. In Remaking the John, you'll explore the many ways people across the globe and through the ages have invented—and reinvented—the toilet. You will learn about everything from ancient Roman sewers to the world's first flush toilets. You'll also find out about the twenty-first-century Reinvent the Toilet Challenge—an engineering contest designed to spur creation of an ecologically friendly, water-saving, inexpensive, and sanitary toilet. And while you're at it, mark World Toilet Day on your calendar. Observed every November 19, this international day of action works to raise awareness about the modern world's many sanitation challenges.

In Unmaking War, Remaking Men: How Empathy Can Reshape Our Politics, Our Soldiers and Ourselves Kathleen Barry answers the perennial question: Is war inevitable? with an emphatic "no." She explores soldiers' experiences through a politics of empathy and reveals how men’s lives are made expendable for combat in which they suffer loss of their own souls. She then probes the psychopathy that marks world leaders from George W. Bush to Ariel Sharon to Osama bin Laden to show how war is made from remorseless indifference to human life. Kathleen Barry asks: ‘What would it take to unmake war?’ by scrutinizing the demilitarized state of Costa Rica and comparing its claims of peace with its high rate of violence against women. Ending war requires unmaking masculinity, a change already under way in men who resist and refuse combat and transform their lives into a new kind of humanity.

Rather than emphasising boundaries and territories by examining the ‘integration’ and ‘acculturation’ of the immigrant or the refugee, this book offers insights into the ideas and practices of individuals settling into new societies and cultures. It analyses their ideas of connecting and belonging; their accounts of the past, the present and the future; the interaction and networks of relations; practical strategies; and the different meanings of ‘home’ and belonging that are constructed in new sociocultural settings. The author uses empirical research to explore the experiences of refugees from the successor states of Yugoslavia, who are struggling to make a home for themselves in Amsterdam and Rome. By explaining how real people navigate through the difficulties of their displacement as well as the numerous scenarios and barriers to their emplacement, the author sheds new light on our understanding of what it is like to be a refugee.