The most honest and insightful study yet written about Disney's much-publicized new town raises important questions about the planned community. Reprint. (view table of contents)

Product Description: Amber has captured the human imagination for centuries, as amulets, ritual cups, and beads dating back 10,000 years attest. It is a fascinating substance, one that offers a unique intersection of the fields of paleontology, botany, entomology, and mineralogy...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: In Real Love, Andrew Ross, one of our preeminent social critics, explores the vital connection between economic life and cultural expression. From the consequences of cyberspace for work and play to the uses and abuses of genetics in the O...read more

An expose of the clothing industry describes the recent efforts of the National Labor Committee to expose abuses in the treatment of garment workers, both here and overseas

In the wake of the highly fractious Culture Wars, conservatives in science have launched a backlash against feminist, multiculturalist, and social critics in science studies. Paul Gross and Norman Levitt’s book Higher Superstition, presented as a wake-up call to scientists unaware of the dangers posed by the “science-bashers,” set the shrill tone of this reaction and led to the appearance of a growing number of scare stories about an “antiscience” movement in the op-ed sections of newspapers across the country. Unwilling to be political scapegoats for the decline in the public funding of science and the erosion of the public authority of scientists, many of these critics—natural scientists, sociologists, anthropologists, historians, and scholars in cultural studies and literary studies—have taken the opportunity to respond to the backlash in Science Wars.At a time when scientific knowledge is systematically whisked out of the domain of education and converted into private capital, the essays in this volume are sharply critical of the conservative defense of a value-free science. They suggest that in a world steeped in nuclear, biogenic, and chemical overdevelopment, those who are skeptical of technology are more than entitled to ask for evidence of rationality in those versions of scientific progress that respond only to the managerial needs of state, corporate, and military elites. Whether uncovering the gender-laden assumptions built into the Western scientific method, redefining the scientific claim to objectivity, showing the relationship between science’s empirical worldview and that of mercantile capitalism, or showing how the powerful language of science exercises its daily cultural authority in our society, the essays in Science Wars announce their own powerful message. Analyzing the antidemocratic tendencies within science and its institutions, they insist on a more accountable relationship between scientists and the communities and environments affected by their research.Revised and expanded from a recent issue of Social Text, Science Wars will provoke thought and controversy among scholars and general readers interested in science studies and current cultural politics.Contributors. Stanley Aronowitz, Sarah Franklin, Steve Fuller, Sandra Harding, Roger Hart, N. Katherine Hayles, Ruth Hubbard, Joel Kovel, Les Levidow, George Levine, Richard Levins, Richard C. Lewontin, Michael Lynch, Emily Martin, Dorothy Nelkin, Hilary Rose, Andrew Ross, Sharon Traweek, Langdon Winner

Product Description: Strange and scary days for an ecology movement that was conceived in fierce opposition to power. Fractured, as ever, by divisions and competing agendas, the movement must now confront the dangerous tendency of those in power to invoke nature’s laws as a model for social well-being...read more

Product Description: Amber: Golden Gem of the Ages, Fourth Edition is unique --· because it describes the Baltic amber industry which has utilized amber as a gem stone throughout the ages. It also describes a variety of fossil resins, their characteristic and locations...read more

Who speaks for science in a technologically dominated society? In his latest work of cultural criticism Andrew Ross contends that this question yields no simple or easy answer. In our present technoculture a wide variety of people, both inside and outside the scientific community, have become increasingly vocal in exercising their right to speak about, on behalf of, and often against, science and technology.Arguing that science can only ever be understood as a social artifact, Strange Weather is a manifesto which calls on cultural critics to abandon their technophobia and contribute to the debates which shape our future. Each chapter focuses on an idea, a practice or community that has established an influential presence in our culture: New Age, computer hacking, cyberpunk, futurology, and global warming.In a book brimming over with intelligence—both human and electronic—Ross examines the state of scientific countercultures in an age when the development of advanced information technologies coexists uneasily with ecological warnings about the perils of unchecked growth. Intended as a contribution to a “green” cultural criticism, Strange Weather is a provocative investigation of the ways in which science is shaping the popular imagination of today, and delimiting the possibilities of tomorrow.

Product Description: Book by Penley, Constance

Looks at changing popular taste in the U.S., and discusses quiz shows, camp, TV programs, photography, and pornography

Universal Abandon was first published in 1989. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.In recent years, the debate about postmodernism has become a full-blown, global discussion about the nature and future of society: it has challenged and redefined the cultural and sexual politics of the last two decades, and is increasingly shaping tomorrow's agenda. Postmodernist culture is a medium in which we all live, no matter how unevenly its effects are felt across the jagged spectrum of color, gender, class, sexual, orientation, region, and nationality. But it is also a culture that proclaims its abandonment of the universalist foundations of Enlightenment thought in the West. At a time when interests can no longer be universalized, the question arises: Whose interests are served by this "universal abandon"?Universal Abandon is the first volume in a new series entitled Cultural Politics, edited by the Social Text collective. This collection tackles a wider range of cultural and political issues than are usually addressed in the debates about postmodernism—color, ethnicity, and neocolonialism; feminism and sexual difference; popular culture and the question of everyday life—as well as some political and philosophical matters that have long been central to the Western tradition. Together, the contributors provide no consensus about the politics of postmodernism; they insist, rather, that "universal abandon?" remain a question and not an answer.The contributors: Anders Stephanson, Chantal Mouffe, Stanley Aronowitz, Ernesto Laclau, Nancy Fraser, Linda Nicholson, Meaghan Morris, Paul Smith, Laura Kipnis, Lawrence Grossberg, Abigail Solomon-Godeau, George Yudice, Jacqueline Rose, and Hal Foster.Andrew Ross teaches English at Princeton University and is the author of The Failure of Modernism.