Published: 05/11/2023
For every generic type of monster—ghost, demon, vampire, dragon—there are countless locally specific manifestations, with their own names, traits, and appearances. Such monsters populate all corners of the globe haunting their humans wherever they live. Living with Monsters is a collection of fourteen short pieces of ethnographic fiction (and a more academically inclined introduction and[…]
Published: 03/02/2023
Before the company OpenAI publicly released their ChatGPT chatbot in November 2022, Robert Leib had been a tester in OpenAI’s beta playground for GPT-3, a powerful Natural Language Processing (NLP) engine — a chatbot, or artificial intelligence. Exoanthropology: Dialogues with AI is a series of dialogues between Leib, a continental philosopher, and GPT-3’s hive mind[…]
Imprint: Lamma
Published: 07/21/2020
Lamma aims to provide a forum for critically understanding the complex ideas, values, social configurations, histories, and material realities in Libya. Recognizing, and insisting on, the urgent need for such a forum, we give attention to a wide a range of disciplines, sources, and approaches, foregrounding especially those which have previously received less scholarly attention.[…]
Published: 10/22/2020
Can one have something in common with a lava field? Can one identify with a mountain, or connect with a contemporary event in the history of the earth, in the way that some people feel connected together by birthday, genetic fingerprint, or zodiac sign? In the terms of the Christian burial ceremony, what is this[…]
Imprint: Brainstorm Books
Published: 06/18/2020
Animal Emotions: How They Drive Human Behavior gives a concise overview of ancient mammalian emotions deeply rooted in the human brain. Jaak Panksepp, a world-renowned neuroscientist, dedicated his life career to the study of mammalian emotions and he carved out seven distinct emotional systems he called seeking, lust, care, and play (positive emotions), and fear,[…]
Imprint: 3Ecologies Books
Published: 04/15/2021
This volume presents the collective adventure of Dingdingdong, the Institute for the Co-production of Knowledge about Huntington’s Disease, founded in 2012 between Paris and Brussels. Katrin Solhdju’s Testing Knowledge: Toward an Ecology of Diagnosis pursues the question of taming the violence of the new species of medical foreknowledge represented by genetic testing. Adopting historical and[…]
Published: 02/07/2020
The idea of the Anthropocene often generates an overwhelming sense of abjection or apathy. It occupies the imagination as a set of circumstances that counterpose individual human actors against ungraspable scales and impossible odds. There is much at stake in how we understand the implications of this planetary imagination, and how to plot paths from[…]
by Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei NOTE: The text of this blog post was originally presented as a lecture at University of California, Santa Barbara Library on May 8, 2018, under the title “Nubian Studies: A Case Study in Scholar-Led Open Access Publishing.” Follow more of Vincent’s work on Old Nubian via Twitter @ontakragoueke. I[…]