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We are in the middle of a major, long-term food crisis—how do we get out of it? The goal of Balancing on a Planet is to empower readers to analyze the challenges facing the agrifood system so they can ask better questions, find more useful answers, and participate in discussion and decision making more effectively in order to contribute to solving the food crisis. This book is an interdisciplinary primer on critical thinking and effective action for the future of our global agrifood system that integrates biophysical, social, economic, cultural, and philosophical components. It explains the fundamental concepts needed for understanding the history, current situation, and possible futures of our agrifood systems—from local to global—and analyzes opposing perspectives. It covers a range of topics, including population, the Neolithic and subsequent revolutions, sustainability, plant breeding and biotechnology, agroecosystems management, common property management, climate change, and localization. A key component of the book is a thorough analysis of the assumptions underlying different perspectives on problems related to food and agriculture around the world and a discussion of alternative solutions. For example, the author argues that combining selected aspects of small-scale traditional agriculture with modern scientific agriculture can help balance our biological need for food with its environmental impact—and it can continue to fulfill cultural, social, and psychological needs related to food.

On January 18, 2012, millions of people participated in the now-infamous “Internet blackout” to protest the Stop Online Piracy Act and the rights it would have given intellectual property holders to shape how people use the Internet. SOPA’s withdrawal was heralded as a victory for an open Internet. However, as Natasha Tusikov documents in Chokepoints: Global Private Regulation on the Internet, rather than accept defeat, a small group of corporations, tacitly backed by the U.S. and other governments, have implemented much of SOPA via a series of secret, handshake agreements among powerful corporations, including Google, PayPal, and Microsoft. This book is the first to explore these agreements. Drawing on extensive interviews with corporate and government officials, Tusikov details the emergence of a new realm of global governance, in which large Internet firms act as global regulators for powerful intellectual property owners like Nike, and raises questions about the threat these new global regimes pose to democratic accountability itself. The book argues that these global regulators are significantly altering the ways in which governments and corporations regulate content and information on the Internet.

Across the world, public opinion about homosexuality varies substantially. While residents in some nations have embraced gay rights as human rights, in other countries, very few people find homosexuality acceptable. Why are there such big differences in attitudes about homosexuality? Using survey data from almost ninety societies, this book shows that cross-national differences in how residents view homosexuality can largely be explained by three country characteristics: the strength of democratic institutions, the level of economic development, and the religious context. While these factors can explain a lot of the differences across the world, the way they shape attitudes within individual nations varies substantially. Each country has a different story to tell about how these forces affect public opinion. Country case studies, a content analysis of newspaper articles, and in-depth interviews are used to unpack the characteristics working within individual and key sets of nations. Attention is given not only to demographic and country characteristics that shape public opinion but also to the way these factors work within specific countries and combine with a nation’s unique history and social context to shape attitudes, laws, policies, and enforcement regarding homosexuality.

How does a photograph become a news image? An ethnography of the labor behind international news images, this book ruptures the self-evidence of the journalistic photograph by revealing the many factors determining how news audiences are shown people, events, and the world. News images, this book argues, function as formative fictions—fictional insofar as these images are constructed and culturally mediated, and formative because their public presence and circulation have real consequences in the world. Set against the backdrop of the War on Terror and based on fieldwork conducted at photojournalism's centers of power, the book offers an intimate look at an industry in crisis. At the turn of the 21st century, image brokers—the people who manage the distribution and restriction of news images—found the core technologies of their craft, the status of images, and their own professional standing all changing rapidly with the digitalization of the infrastructures of representation. From corporate sales meetings to wire service desks, newsrooms to photography workshops and festivals, the book investigates how news images are produced and how worldviews are reproduced in the process.

Politicking and Emergent Media looks at four presidential campaigns in the United States during the long 1890s (1888-1900) and the ways in which Republicans and Democrats mobilized a wide variety of media forms in their efforts to achieve electoral victory. The 1890s was a pivotal era in which new means of audio and visual inscription were first deployed. Newspapers remained the dominant media, and Democrats had gained sufficient advantage in 1884 to put Grover Cleveland in the White House. In 1888 Republicans responded by strengthening their media arm with a variety of tactics, using the stereopticon, a modernized magic lantern, to deliver popular illustrated lectures on the protective tariff which helped Republican candidate Benjamin Harrison defeat Cleveland--though Harrison lost the rematch four years later. Efforts to regain a media advantage continued in 1896 as Republicans embraced motion pictures, the phonograph and telephone to further William McKinley’s campaign for president. When the traditionally Democratic press rejected “Free Silver” candidate William Jennings Bryan, McKinley’s victory was assured. As the United States became a world power in the aftermath of the Spanish-American War, audio-visual media promoted American Imperialism, the “paramount issue” of the 1900 election, as McKinley won a second term.

Are girls taking over the world? It would appear so based on magazine covers, news headlines, and popularized books touting girls’ academic success. As a result, many in Western society assume that girls now play on an equal playing field so have nothing to complain about. But contrary to the widespread belief that girls have surpassed the need for support because they are ‘doing well’ in school, smart girls struggle in ways that have been made invisible. Why do some girls choose to dumb down? How do smart girls handle being labeled ‘nerd’ or ‘loner? How do they deal with stress, including the ‘Supergirl’ drive for perfection? How are race and class part of smart girls’ negotiations of academic success? And how do smart girls engage with the sexism that is still present in schools, in spite of messages to the contrary? Set against the powerful backdrops of post-feminism and neo-liberalism where girls are told they now ‘have it all’, Smart Girls sheds light on girls’ varied everyday experiences, strategic negotiations of traditional gender norms, and the savoring of success – all while keeping their eyes on an A+ and a bright future.

This book is a study of sounds that aims to write the resonance and response they call for. It seeks to critique existing models in the expanding field of sound studies and draw attention to sound as an object of study that solicits a humanistic approach encompassing many types of sounds, not just readily classified examples such as speech, music, industrial sounds, or codified signals. The text looks into the fact that beyond hearing and listening we “audit” sounds and do so by drawing on paradigms of thought not easily accommodated within the concept of “sound studies.” To draw attention to the ways in which sounds often are not perceived for the social and political functions they serve, each chapter presents a culturally resonant sound—including a whistle, an echo, a gasp, and silence—to show how sounds enable critical social and political concepts such as dialogue, privacy, memory, social order, and art-making.