Making Things International 2

Drawing widely from contemporary social and critical thought, Making Things International 2 offers provocative interventions into debates about causality, connection, and politics through the notion of assemblage. Political assemblages, especially those that cross national borders, can be catalyzed by a host of surprising sparks. Present-day global systems are complex and interdependent, but the worn tools of traditional international relations theory are unsuited to the task of understanding how objects, ideas, and people come together to create, dispute, solve, or perhaps cause these political configurations. Contributors to this volume bring to their work a new sensitivity toward issues of power, authority, control, and sovereignty. The companion volume, Making Things International 1: Circuits and Motion, used things, stuff, and objects in motion to capture the material dynamics of global politics and to demonstrate the importance of the material. This volume builds on that conversation by examining objects that incite political assemblages. Specific subjects include fighter jets, smartphones, tents, HTTP cookies, representations of North Korea, and histories of the diplomatic cable, the orange prison jumpsuit, and container shipping. Contributors: Rune Saugmann Andersen, U of Helsinki; Josef Teboho Ansorge; Claudia Aradau, King’s College London; Helen Arfvidsson; Alexander D. Barder, Florida International U; Tarak Barkawi, London School of Economics; Peter Chambers; Shine Choi, Seoul National U; Sagi Cohen; Thomas N. Cooke; Anna Feigenbaum, Bournemouth U; Andreas Folkers, Goethe–U Frankfurt; Fabian Frenzel, U of Leicester; Kyle Grayson, Newcastle U; Nicky Gregson, Durham U; David Grondin, U of Ottawa; Xavier Guillaume, U of Edinburgh; Emily Lindsay Jackson, Acadia U; Miguel de Larrinaga, U of Ottawa; Debbie Lisle, Queen’s U Belfast; Mary Manjikian, Regent U; Nadine Marquardt, Goethe–U Frankfurt; Patrick McCurdy, U of Ottawa; Adam Sandor; Nisha Shah, U of Ottawa; Julian Stenmanns, Goethe–U Frankfurt; Casper Sylvest, U of Southern Denmark; Rens van Munster, Danish Institute for International Studies; Elspeth Van Veeren, U of Bristol; Srdjan Vucetic, U of Ottawa; Juha A. Vuori, U of Turku; Tobias Wille.

Building on recent debates in critical social theory and international relations, Making Things International I: Circuits and Motion presents twenty-five essays that engage the global, the local, and the international through the lens of objects. It represents the first substantial new materialist intervention in global politics and international relations, offering a diverse and provocative set of reflections on how different objects create, sustain, complicate, and trouble the international. Problematizing the stuff of global life, Making Things International focuses on contemporary materialist scholarship on the international realm. The first of two volumes, these original contributions by both new and established scholars examine how war, diplomacy, trade, communication, and mobile populations are made by things: weapons, vehicles, shipping containers, commodities, passports, and more. The authors demonstrate how mundane, everyday objects—not normally understood as international—are in fact deeply implicated in how we think of the world: blood, garbage, viruses, traffic lights, clocks, memes, and ships’ ballast. Contributors: Michele Acuto, U College London; Peter Adey, Royal Holloway U of London; Rune Saugmann Andersen, U of Helsinki; Jessica Auchter, U of Tennessee at Chattanooga; Mike Bourne, Queen’s U Belfast; Kathleen P. J. Brennan; Elizabeth Cobbett, U of East Anglia; Stefanie Fishel, Hobart and William Smith Colleges; Emily Gilbert, U of Toronto; Jairus Grove, U of Hawai‘i at Manoa; Charlie Hailey, U of Florida; John Law, Open U; Wen-yuan Lin, National Tsing-hua U; Oded Löwenheim, Hebrew U of Jerusalem; Chris Methmann; Benjamin J. Muller, U of Western Ontario; Can E. Mutlu, Bilkent U; Geneviève Piché; Joseph Pugliese, Macquarie U; Katherine Reese; Michael J. Shapiro, U of Hawai‘i at Manoa; Benjamin Stephan; Daniel Vanderlip; William Walters, Carleton U; Melissa Autumn White, U of British Columbia; Lauren Wilcox, U of Cambridge; Yvgeny Yanovsky.

Considers ways to promote the restoration of American leadership in manufacturing technology, which is now considered a national security issue. Includes strategies to improve U.S. manufacturing technology, financing long-term investments, human resources, links between firms and industries, technology transfer and diffusion, and public policy and technology. Graphs.

The first volume, Making Things International 1: Circuits and Motion, used things, stuff, and objects in motion to capture the material dynamics of global politics and to demonstrate the importance of the material. Volume two builds on that conversation by examining objects that incite political assemblages. Specific subjects include fighter jets, smartphones, tents, HTTP cookies, representations of North Korea, and histories of the diplomatic cable, the orange prison jumpsuit, and container shipping.

This book contains a series of projects that teaches readers what they need to know to get their creations talking to each other, connecting to the Web, and forming networks of smart devices.

This brilliantly original book dismantles the underlying assumptions that drive the decisions made by companies and governments throughout the world, to show that our shared narrative of the global economy is deeply flawed. If left unexamined, they will lead corporations and countries astray, with dire consequences for us all. For the past fifty years or so, the global economy has been run on three big assumptions: that globalization will continue to spread, that trade is the engine of growth and development, and that economic power is moving from the West to the East. More recently, it has also been taken as a given that our interconnectedness—both physical and digital—will increase without limit. But what if all these ideas are wrong? What if everything is about to change? What if it has already begun to change but we just haven't noticed? Increased automation, the advent of additive manufacturing (3D printing, for example), and changes in shipping and environmental pressures, among other factors, are coming together to create a fast-changing global economic landscape in which the rules are being rewritten—at once a challenge and an opportunity for companies and countries alike.

"This collection itself presents a significant public assembly, joining such prominent thinkers as Richard Rorty, Simon Schaffer, Peter Galison, and Peter Sloterdijk with the likes of Shakespeare, Swift, La Fontaine, and Melville. Ranging from the distant past to the troubled present, this collective effort examines the atmospheric conditions in which things are made public, and reinvests political representation with the materiality it has been lacking. This book, and the ZKM show that it accompanies, aims to trigger new political passions and interests in a time when people need, more than ever, new ways to have their voices heard."--BOOK JACKET.

Addresses the question of valuation theoretically and through empirical analysts of diverse objects of valuations such as university rankings, ice skating scoring, wind power, insurance, gold, and big data.