Abstract. This essay presents the idea of governance archaeology, an approach to learning from the past to inform the politics of the future. By reporting on a prototype historical database, we outline a strategy for co-producing a global commons of collective governance practices that can inspire institutional learning and experimentation, particularly in the face of rapid technological change and vexing global crises. Embedded in our approach is an orientation of ancestry whereby practitioners cultivate relationships of accountability and responsibility to the legacies they learn from, recognizing the harm from past patterns of exploitation. By taking seriously a wide range of historical governance practices, particularly those outside the Western canon, governance archaeology seeks to expand the options available for the design of more moral political economies.
Do Artifacts Have Politics?
Langdon Winner, Do Artifacts Have Politics?, Daedalus, Vol. 109, No. 1, Modern Technology: Problem or Opportunity? (Winter, 1980), pp. 121-136
How May the ‘Anthropocene’ Enable and Constrain Cybersystemic Governance? The ‘Anthropocene Problematique’
A growing awareness of the need for cybernetics and systems thinking (cybersystemic) in praxes of governance to improve human-biosphere relationships in the Anthropocene has become apparent. Nonetheless, mainstream governance informed by linear-causality seems to perpetuate an increasingly inadequate paradigm of dominant first-order/systematic thinking in governing complex interactions between humans and their natural environments. This conundrum is explored through the second-order lens of a systemic inquiry, using an integrative literature review. We discuss limitations of the Anthropocene metaphor and make the case for a reframing of our situation (humans’ co-evolutionary dynamic with the biosphere) as the ‘Anthropocene problematique’. This reframing as a systemic-duality offers more conducive affordances for trajectory-shifting cybersystemic governance to emerge. Aligning with a body of literature evidencing the influence of language on human cognition, we argue that by joining up the strengths of both ideas, ‘Anthropocene problematique’ may form a conceptual device amenable to changing worldviews and guiding practical action in governing human-biosphere relationships. We suggest a conceptual framework for practitioners to design and enact purposeful systems of cybersystemic governance with potential to improve situated Anthropocene problematiques. This framing and theoretical proposal are motivated by a need for shifts towards a social purpose of healing human-biosphere relationships in current governance systems in the Anthropocene-world.
Do Artifacts Have Politics? on JSTOR
Langdon Winner, Do Artifacts Have Politics?, Daedalus, Vol. 109, No. 1, Modern Technology: Problem or Opportunity? (Winter, 1980), pp. 121-136
The Climate of History in a Planetary Age
For the past decade, historian Dipesh Chakrabarty has been one of the most influential scholars addressing the meaning of climate change. Climate change, he argues, upends long-standing ideas of history, modernity, and globalization. The burden of The Climate of History in a Planetary Age is to grapple with what this means and to confront humanities scholars with ideas they have been reluctant to reconsider—from the changed nature of human agency to a new acceptance of universals. Chakrabarty argues that we must see ourselves from two perspectives at once: the planetary and the global. This distinction is central to Chakrabarty’s work—the globe is a human-centric construction, while a planetary perspective intentionally decenters the human. Featuring wide-ranging excursions into historical and philosophical literatures, The Climate of History in a Planetary Age boldly considers how to frame the human condition in troubled times. As we open ourselves to the implications of the Anthropocene, few writers are as likely as Chakrabarty to shape our understanding of the best way forward.
HOME - Daniel Schmachtenberger
EXPLORATIONS ON THE FUTURE OF CIVILIZATION Some of the central questions being explored here: With the first fully globalized civilization, how do we avoid the collapse fate that has befallen all previous civilizations? What are effective types of immune systems for identifying and correcting corruption in governance systems? How do we comprehensively disincentivize misinformation and harm to … HOME Read More »
The Chinese Attitude Towards the Past | China Heritage Quarterly
Covering contempory Chinese archaeology, heritage and conservation issues.
Sapiens [Tenth Anniversary Edition]: A Brief History of Humankind
New York Times Readers’ Pick: Top 100 Books of the 21st CenturyThe tenth anniversary edition of the internationally bestselling phenomenon that cemented Yuval Noah Harari as one of the most prominent historians of our time—featuring a new afterword from the author.One hundred thousand years ago, at least six human species inhabited the earth. Today there is just one. Us. Homo sapiens. How did our species succeed in the battle for dominance? Why did our foraging ancestors come together to create cities and kingdoms? How did we come to believe in gods, nations, and human rights; to trust money, books, and laws; and to be enslaved by bureaucracy, timetables, and consumerism? And what will our world be like in the millennia to come?In Sapiens, Professor Yuval Noah Harari spans the whole of human history, from the very first humans to walk the earth to the radical—and sometimes devastating—breakthroughs of the Cognitive, Agricultural, and Scientific Revolutions. Drawing on insights from biology, anthropology, paleontology, and economics, and incorporating full-color illustrations throughout the text, he explores how the currents of history have shaped our human societies, the animals and plants around us, and even our personalities. Can we ever free our behavior from the legacy of our ancestors? And what, if anything, can we do to influence the course of the centuries to come?Bold, wide-ranging, and provocative, Sapiens integrates history and science to challenge everything we thought we knew about being human: our thoughts, our actions, our heritage...and our future.
Doctrine of Discovery Project
Explore the Doctrine of Discovery Project archive of legal history, papal bulls, repudiations, and resources on Indigenous sovereignty, justice, and decolonization.
A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None
Check out A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None - <p><b>Rewriting the “origin stories” of the Anthropocene</b><br /><br /> No geology is neutral, writes Kathryn Yusoff. Tracing the color line of the Anthropocene, <i>A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None</i> examines how the grammar of geology is foundational to establishing the extractive economies of subjective life and the earth under colonialism and slavery. Yusoff initiates a transdisciplinary conversation between feminist black theory, geography, and the earth sciences, addressing the politics of the Anthropocene within the context of race, materiality, deep time, and the afterlives of geology.<br /><br /> Forerunners is a thought-in-process series of breakthrough digital works. Written between fresh ideas and finished books, Forerunners draws on scholarly work initiated in notable blogs, social media, conference plenaries, journal articles, and the synergy of academic exchange. This is gray literature publishing: where intense thinking, change, and speculation take place in scholarship.</p> by Kathryn Yusoff on Bookshop.org UK!
Humanitarian Governance
This review examines humanitarian governance, defined as the increasingly organized and internationalized attempt to save the lives, enhance the welfare, and reduce the suffering of the world's most vulnerable populations. Political scientists and international relations scholars are only now beginning to explain this rapidly growing global governance of humanity, which is particularly evident in the developing literatures on humanitarian intervention, emergency relief, peacebuilding, and refugee protection. As they increasingly engage this relatively unexplored area of global life, political scientists are using the familiar analytics of the global governance literature to explain the origins, design, and effectiveness of this collective activity. This essay, though, interjects an alternative perspective, one that draws from critical theory, to widen the research agenda of the study of humanitarian governance. Specifically, the essay raises six central questions: What kind of world is being imagined and produced? What accounts for the tremendous growth of humanitarian governance over the last century? Who governs? How is humanitarian governance organized and accomplished? What are the principal techniques of control? By what authority do humanitarians govern and what do they do with that authority?
Utopian media studies: Introduction
This introduction to the special issue ‘Utopian Media Studies’ sketches a framework for how media studies can become a site of utopian praxis, research and experimentation. It first addresses three apprehensions media scholars might have about the notion of utopian media studies and its appeal to a loaded concept like ‘utopia’. The introduction then outlines five sensibilities to explicate the nature and significance of this special issue’s contribution to the field: a utopian media studies must adopt an ecological approach to media; recognize and be invigorated by limits; work toward the technological liberation of time; connect imagination with practice; and emphasize and enable conditions for transmitting hope. Lastly, the introduction considers Ruth Levitas’s distinction between utopia’s archaeological, ontological, and architectural mode to map some of the concrete ways in which existing media studies research is doing utopian work that aligns with these sensibilities. In connecting work that operates in these modes with the various contributions to this special issue, the introduction reveals the utopian currents that already run through media studies as a discipline and opens up new conceptual and methodological approaches to studying and modeling digital utopias.
Utopian media studies: Introduction
This introduction to the special issue ‘Utopian Media Studies’ sketches a framework for how media studies can become a site of utopian praxis, research and experimentation. It first addresses three apprehensions media scholars might have about the notion of utopian media studies and its appeal to a loaded concept like ‘utopia’. The introduction then outlines five sensibilities to explicate the nature and significance of this special issue’s contribution to the field: a utopian media studies must adopt an ecological approach to media; recognize and be invigorated by limits; work toward the technological liberation of time; connect imagination with practice; and emphasize and enable conditions for transmitting hope. Lastly, the introduction considers Ruth Levitas’s distinction between utopia’s archaeological, ontological, and architectural mode to map some of the concrete ways in which existing media studies research is doing utopian work that aligns with these sensibilities. In connecting work that operates in these modes with the various contributions to this special issue, the introduction reveals the utopian currents that already run through media studies as a discipline and opens up new conceptual and methodological approaches to studying and modeling digital utopias.
Modular Politics: Toward a Governance Layer for Online Communities
Governance in online communities is an increasingly high-stakes challenge, and yet many basic features of offline governance legacies--juries, political parties, term limits, and formal debates, to name a few--are not in the feature-sets of the software most community platforms use. Drawing on the paradigm of Institutional Analysis and Development, this paper proposes a strategy for addressing this lapse by specifying basic features of a generalizable paradigm for online governance called Modular Politics. Whereas classical governance typologies tend to present a choice among wholesale ideologies, such as democracy or oligarchy, Modular Politics would enable platform operators and their users to build bottom-up governance processes from computational components that are modular and composable, highly versatile in their expressiveness, portable from one context to another, and interoperable across platforms. This kind of approach could implement pre-digital governance systems as well as accelerate innovation in uniquely digital techniques. As diverse communities share and connect their components and data, governance could occur through a ubiquitous network layer. To that end, this paper proposes the development of an open standard for networked governance.
Reimagining Ourselves at the End of Our World: Kinship, Interconnection, and Spirituality in the Metacrisis - The Great Simplification
Over the past decade, the world has become increasingly chaotic and uncertain – and so, too, has our cultural vision for the future. While the events we face now may feel unprecedented, they are rooted in much deeper patterns, which humanity has been playing out for millennia. If we take the time to understand past trends, we can also employ practices and philosophies that might counteract them – such as focusing on kinship, intimacy, and resilience – to help pave the way for a better future. How might we nurture the foundations of a different kind of society, even while the end of our current civilization plays out around us?
Field Theory: AI as Social Science Question, Object & Tool
Uses of advanced artificial intelligence are changing how societies organize labor, govern, produce knowledge, and make meaning. In light of these developments, this essay argues that AI models, tools, and systems pose three interrelated imperatives for social science: they demand renewed attention to social theories of how technology, human experience, and social order are entangled; they require study as objects of inquiry in their own right; and they offer capabilities that may transform—or upend—the practice of social investigation itself. From Weber’s analysis of rationalization to Du Bois’s study of technology and inequality to contemporary scholarship on algorithmic governance, the essay examines what social science distinctively offers: the capacity to historicize the apparently unprecedented, to trace connections across scales, and to center those most affected by technological change. It identifies how algorithmic systems are remaking the distribution of opportunity and risk as a central task of social inquiry and asks what futures social science might help bring into being.