Everyday Life Ecologies: Sustainability, Crisis, Resistance is about those complex, sticky, but also open arrangements of bodies, objects, and plants that make up daily existence. The multiple and interlocking lines of a long capitalist crisis disrupt their normal flow: sometimes, they open opportunities for transformation, sometimes else, they foreclose horizons of change. In contrast with approaches that respond to environmental crisis by advocating “sustainable lifestyles” and “responsible behaviors,” Alice Dal Gobbo suggests that it is necessary to address the complex socio-material relationalities that constitute everyday ecologies. Beyond that, the book argues for their politicization, illuminating daily existence as embedded in capitalist relations of re/production. Combining political ecology and new materialist sensitivities, this book investigates the ways in which ecologically damaging logics are inscribed in everyday assemblages through their habitual rehearsal and libidinal hold. But it also points to how apparently banal acts of resistance embody and promote different logics, such as a logic of care and an ecological “aesth-ethics” of desire. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in the Northeast of Italy, this journey through the concrete matters and beings of daily life in crisis talks beyond this emplaced reality and dialogues with emerging forms of contestation and prefiguration that put socio-ecological reproduction at their center.

The dramatic acceleration of digital technologies and their integration into physical products is transforming everyday objects. Our domestic appliances, furniture, clothing, are growing in intelligence. Smart objects are increasingly capable of interacting with humans in a purposeful manner with intentionality. This collection of essays, descriptions of empirical work, and design case studies brings together perspectives from interaction design, the humanities, science and technology studies, and engineering, to map, explore and interrogate ways in which our relationships with everyday smart objects might expand and be re-imagined. By offering a critical assessment on the growing place of smart technology in everyday environments, this book outlines a transdisciplinary research agenda for the future of 'smartness' to help define, envision, and inspire future collaborative design practices. These essays propose an understanding and design of smart objects that embrace their hybrid nature as shifting and blending tools, agents, machines, or even 'creatures'. Authors argue that smart objects have the potential to enter into multiple kinds of relationships with humans, and form complex human-nonhuman ecologies that are both meaningful and empowering in the context of everyday life. This book also shines a light on the hidden infrastructures behind the functioning of smart objects with stirring debates tackling questions of technology, human values, and economic and ecological impact. Whether you are a design scholar, design practitioner or design activist this book will inspire through offering theoretical insights, design concepts and practical ways on how to engage in this research agenda for future smartness.

Talk and Social Theory will be an essential text for students of sociolinguistics and the analysis of discourse in conversation. introduces the study of 'talk' linked to social theory; develops a new theoretical argument that reviews the relations between local social practices and general societal processes of talk; the use of everyday examples - a family dinner table, a school classroom, an academic advising session in an community college - enhances the book’s appeal to a non-specialist as well as a specialist audience; reviews the key theoretical perspectives and conceptual frameworks in social theory and in the sociolinguistic study of talk.

Ecologies of Prosperity for the Living City is a collection of writings, interviews, and projects exploring themes introduced during the 2016 Woltz Symposium: Novel Synergies, the Instrumental Commons, and Dispersed Concentrations. With new material from speakers Philippe Rahm, Nina-Marie Lister, Marina Alberti, Paola Viganò, Niek Hazendonk, Albert Cuchí, and Jedediah Purdy, the dialogue is framed by a series of seminal texts from the 20th century and reimagines existing urban challenges through exemplary design projects of today. Structured as a reader for students and design practitioners, it promotes urban design as a catalyst for cultural, social, and environmental transformation within cities, towns, communities, institutions, and individuals faced with today's most pressing urban challenges.

Living Deep Ecology: A Bioregional Journey is an exploration of our evolving relationship with a specific bioregion. It is set in Humboldt County in northwestern California, in the Klamath-Siskiyou bioregion. By focusing on a specific bioregion and reflecting on anthropogenic changes in this bioregion over three decades, Bill Devall engages the reader in asking deeper questions about the meaning we find in Nature. He addresses questions such as how do we relate the facts and theories presented by science with our feelings, our intimacy, and our sense of Place as we dwell in a specific bioregion. This book engages the reader to consider our place in Nature. Devall approaches the bioregion not from the perspective of agencies and government, but from the perspective of the landscape itself.

A call for informed, responsible engagement with information technology at the local level. The common rhetoric about technology falls into two extreme categories: uncritical acceptance or blanket rejection. Claiming a middle ground, Bonnie Nardi and Vicki O'Day call for responsible, informed engagement with technology in local settings, which they call information ecologies. An information ecology is a system of people, practices, technologies, and values in a local environment. Nardi and O'Day encourage the reader to become more aware of the ways people and technology are interrelated. They draw on their empirical research in offices, libraries, schools, and hospitals to show how people can engage their own values and commitments while using technology.

Your house is flooded by 'unseasonal' heavy rain. What do you learn from this experience? Do you shrug your shoulders and call your insurer? Or do you choose to learn about climate change, switch to renewable energy and lobby politicians? In this insightful book, John Blewitt explores the possibilities for developing a sustainable society through 'lifelong learning' - that is, learning that happens in everyday environments and activities as diverse as shopping, community, 'edutainment,' information and communication technology, the Internet, broadcasting, people's experience of place and space green building, social networks and consumer culture.

This book takes a new look at the 'spatial turn' in French cultural and critical theory since 1968. It examines how key thinkers (inc. Henri Lefebvre, Michel de Certeau, Jean Baudrillard, Marc Augé, Paul Virilio, Bruno Latour and Etienne Balibar) reconsider the experience of space in the midst of considerable political and economic turmoil.

This book draws on ethnographic studies in Southeast Asia to provide new insights into human–environmental relationships and ecologies, together with a set of theoretical innovations. Contextualizing ecologies in this region as pluralizing or hegemonic, conflictive or cooperative, the case studies in these chapters bring into dialogue ontological approaches, the issue of distinct worldviews and concepts of nature on the one hand and political ecology and power relations on the other. They discuss plural ecologies in diverse settings, reaching from urban Vietnam to the Javanese coast and the dense forests of the Southeast Asian highlands. Southeast Asia is one of the most biodiverse and culturally diverse regions in the world. Thus, what occurs in this region is vitally important to the future of Earth. Documenting the plurality and dynamics of ecologies in Southeast Asia, this book provides prime examples for the potentials of alternative human–environmental relationships and sustainable development. It will be of interest to academics studying political ecology, environmental anthropology, sustainability sciences, political sciences, development studies, human geography, human ecology, Southeast Asian studies, and Asian studies.

Many Christian institutions have embraced new technologies, especially online education. But is it possible for us to grow spiritually through our digital communities? Steve Lowe and Mary Lowe, longtime proponents of online education, trace the motif of spiritual growth through Scripture and consider how students and professors alike might foster digital ecologies in which spiritual transformation can take place.