To The Last Drop Affective Economies Of Extraction And Sentimentality

The romance of extraction underlies and partly defines Western modernity and our cultural imaginaries. Combining affect studies and environmental humanities, this volume analyzes societies' devotion to extraction and fossil resources. This devotion is shaped by a nostalgic view on settler colonialism as well as by contemporary »affective economies« (Sara Ahmed). The contributors examine the links between forms of extractivism and gendered discourses of sentimentality and the ways in which cultural narratives and practices deploy the sentimental mode (in plots of attachment, sacrifice, and suffering) to promote or challenge extractivism.

Waiting is an inescapable part of life in modern societies. We all wait, albeit differently and for different reasons. What does it mean to wait for a long period of time? How do people narrate their waiting? Waiting is about the senses. If you do not sense it, there is no waiting. We sense waiting in the form of boredom, despair, anxiety and restlessness, but also anticipation and hope. Prolonged waiting is like insomnia - a state of wakefulness, a kind of mood, an emotional state. But it is also about politics; affecting and affected by gender, citizenship, class, and race. Blending ethnography, philosophy, poetry, art, and fiction, this book is a collection of works by scholars, visual artists, writers, architects and curators, exploring different forms of waiting in diverse geographical contexts, and the enduring effects of history, power, class, and coloniality.

In the past fifty years, port cities around the world have experienced considerable changes to their morphologies and their identities. The increasing intensification of global networks and logistics, and the resulting pressure on human societies and earthly environments have been characteristic of the rise of a »planetary age«. This volume engages with contemporary artistic practices and critical poetics that trace an alternate construction of the imaginaries and aspirations of our present societies at the crossroads of sea and land - taking into account complex pasts and interconnected histories, transnational flux, as well as material and immaterial borders.

This volume maps the watershed areas between two 'holy grails' of computer science: the identification and interpretation of affect – including sentiment and mood. The expression of sentiment and mood involves the use of metaphors, especially in emotive situations. Affect computing is rooted in hermeneutics, philosophy, political science and sociology, and is now a key area of research in computer science. The 24/7 news sites and blogs facilitate the expression and shaping of opinion locally and globally. Sentiment analysis, based on text and data mining, is being used in the looking at news and blogs for purposes as diverse as: brand management, film reviews, financial market analysis and prediction, homeland security. There are systems that learn how sentiments are articulated. This work draws on, and informs, research in fields as varied as artificial intelligence, especially reasoning and machine learning, corpus-based information extraction, linguistics, and psychology.

Comfort is a prominent and highly loaded concept, as popular discourses on cosy environments, safe spaces, but also the importance of ›getting out of your comfort zone‹ attest. This volume is the first to investigate ›comfort‹ as a cultural narrative and emotional touchstone in contemporary culture. Taken together, the contributions to the volume offer an overview of different approaches to and conceptualisations of comfort in linguistics, in literary, media, and cultural studies, and art history. They showcase how ›comfort‹ serves as a valuable lens to analyse contemporary artworks and developments, e.g. live theatre broadcasting or political interventions in the US-American media sphere.

This essential introduction to American studies examines the core foundational myths upon which the nation is based and which still determine discussions of US-American identities today. These myths include the myth of »discovery,« the Pocahontas myth, the myth of the Promised Land, the myth of the Founding Fathers, the melting pot myth, the myth of the West, and the myth of the self-made man. The chapters provide extended analyses of each of these myths, using examples from popular culture, literature, memorial culture, school books, and every-day life. Including visual material as well as study questions, this book will be of interest to any student of American studies and will foster an understanding of the United States of America as an imagined community by analyzing the foundational role of myths in the process of nation building.

From self-help books and nootropics, to self-tracking and home health tests, to the tinkering with technology and biological particles - biohacking brings biology, medicine, and the material foundation of life into the sphere of »do-it-yourself«. This trend has the potential to fundamentally change people's relationship with their bodies and biology but it also creates new cultural narratives of responsibility, authority, and differentiation. Covering a broad range of examples, this book explores practices and representations of biohacking in popular culture, discussing their ambiguous position between empowerment and requirement, promise and prescription.

"David Harvey examines the internal contradictions within the flow of capital that have precipitated recent crises. While the contradictions have made capitalism flexible and resilient, they also contain the seeds of systemic catastrophe"--