A selection of recent books and articles written, edited and co-authored by CRASSH researchers and fellows. You can find many more examples of the multi-disciplinary output by our researchers in our Publications section.
Decolonial Ecologies: The Reinvention of Natural History in Latin American Art
Joanna Page (Director, CRASSH)
In Decolonial Ecologies: The Reinvention of Natural History in Latin American Art, Joanna Page illuminates the ways in which contemporary artists in Latin America are reinventing historical methods of collecting, organising, and displaying nature in order to develop new aesthetic and political perspectives on the past and the present.
Find out more in a Q&A about the book with Joanna Page
The Proof Stage: How Theater Reveals the Human Truth of Mathematics
Stephen Abbott (Visiting Fellow at CRASSH in 2010, when the idea for this book was born)
How playwrights from Alfred Jarry and Samuel Beckett to Tom Stoppard and Simon McBurney brought the power of abstract mathematics to the human stage.
Find out more in a book Q&A with Stephen Abbot
Discourses of the Arab Revolutions in Media and Politics
Stefanie Ullmann (Postdoctoral Research Associate, Giving Voice to Digital Democracies)
Drawing on approaches from critical discourse analysis, corpus linguistics, and cognitive linguistics, this book critically examines metaphorical language used in global media coverage and political statements on the events of the Arab Spring.
The book is now out in paperback.
Find out more in a book Q&A with Stefanie Ullmann
Film and Television Production in the Age of Climate Crisis: Towards a Greener Screen
Hunter Vaughan (Senior Research Associate, Minderoo Centre for Technology and Democracy) & Pietari Kääpä
This volume brings together a range of voices from across the global environmental media community to build a comparative international set of perspectives on ‘green’ film and television production. Through this, it provides a necessary intervention in environmental media studies that actively foregrounds media infrastructure, production, policy, and labour – that is, the management and practice of media production cultures.
Secondhand China: Spain, the East, and the Politics of Translation
Carles Prado-Fonts (Visiting Fellow)
This transcultural study of cultural production brings to light the ways Spanish literature imagined China by relying on English- and French-language sources. Carles Prado-Fonts examines how the simultaneous dependence on and obscuring of translation in these cross-cultural representations created the illusion of a homogeneous West. He argues that Orientalism became an instrument of hegemony not only between “the West and the rest” but also within the West itself, where Spanish writers used representations of China to connect themselves to Europe, hone a national voice, or forward ideas of political and cultural modernity.
Human-Centered Data Science: An Introduction
Gina Neff (Director, Minderoo Centre for Technology and Democracy), Cecilia Aragon, Shion Guha, Marina Kogan, Michael Muller
Human-centered data science is a new interdisciplinary field that draws from human-computer interaction, social science, statistics, and computational techniques. This book, written by founders of the field, introduces best practices for addressing the bias and inequality that may result from the automated collection, analysis, and distribution of very large datasets. It offers a brief and accessible overview of many common statistical and algorithmic data science techniques, explains human-centered approaches to data science problems, and presents practical guidelines and real-world case studies to help readers apply these methods.
Articles
Definition drives design: Disability models and mechanisms of bias in AI technologies
Louise Hickman (Senior Research Associate, Minderoo Centre for Technology and Democracy), Denis Newman-Griffis, Jessica Sage Rauchberg, Rahaf Alharbi, Harry Hochheiser
This article illustrates how bias in AI-assisted decision-making can arise from a range of specific design decisions, each of which may seem self-contained and non-biasing when considered separately. These design decisions include basic problem formulation, the data chosen for analysis, the use the AI technology is put to, and operational design elements in addition to the core algorithmic design.
The aleatory moment of finance and the structural production of class-based inequality
Niamh Mulcahy (Alice Tong Sze Research Fellow)
This article considers the conceptual role that contingency plays in class-based inequality, by examining financial insecurity in the UK following the 2008 financial crisis, austerity, and the COVID-19 pandemic.
Yeast, coal, and straw: J. B. S. Haldane’s vision for the future of science and synthetic food
Matt Holmes, (Postdoctoral Research Associate with Artefact until 2022)
Over the past forty years, countries in the Global North have increasingly restricted their migration policies to reduce the arrival of migrants. As part of this, development aid has become a central tool in the migration control strategy pursued by European countries and the US, with donors, International Organisations and NGOs becoming prominent actors. In this book, Lorena Gazzotti shows that migration control is not only exercised through fences and deportation. Building on extensive research in Morocco, Gazzotti shows that aid marks the rise of a substantially different mode of migration containment, one where power works beyond fast violence, and its disciplinary potential is augmented precisely by its elusiveness.
The Technocratic Populist Loop: Clashes Between Parliamentary and Popular Sovereignty in EU’s Eastern and Southern Periphery
Julia Rone (Research Associate, Minderoo Centre for Technology and Democracy), Emilija Tudzarovka
In the aftermath of the 2008 economic crisis, claims to popular sovereignty have strongly clashed with claims to parliamentary sovereignty. In the two paired comparisons analysed in this chapter—Greece and Slovenia, on one hand, Italy and Bulgaria, on the other—the sovereignty conflicts are interpreted in a dialectic fashion: these conflicts are only caused by the weakening of parliaments, they also contribute to their further weakening, and therefore, further impeding their role of scrutiny in European multilevel governance.
The Representation of Refugees, Migrants and Migration in the British Media Discourse of 2015
An article within The Representation of REFUGEES and MIGRANTS in European National Media Discourses from 2015 to 2017
Stefanie Ullmann (Postdoctoral Research Associate with Giving Voice to Digital Democracies)
In the United Kingdom, the height of the so-called ‘European refugee crisis’ coincided with ongoing Brexit debates and an already tense socio-political environment. This sparked a great level of not only parliamentary, but public discussion and media attention. Headlines such as ‘UK’s full up’ or ‘the floodgates are open’ in reference to immigration have become frequent sights in British tabloids in recent years.
Visit our Publications section to find more writing by our members.
