New living book about life: the unborn human by Deborah Lupton

THE UNBORN HUMAN, edited by Deborah Lupton:
http://www.livingbooksaboutlife.org/books/The_Unborn_Human

Open Humanities Press is pleased to announce the publication of The Unborn Human, the 24th book in its open access Living Books About Life series.

The essays in this collection, edited by Deborah Lupton of the Department of Sociology and Social Policy at the University of Sydney, examine the unprecedented level of discursive prominence unborn human organisms – embryos and foetuses – experience in the contemporary era. Debates about the moral status of the unborn, about their claims to personhood and whether they should be treated as full human subjects, have been ongoing for a long time, particularly in areas related to religious philosophy, bioethics and abortion politics. Over the past half-century, however, these debates have become more diversified, intense and complex in response to a number of social, technological and economic changes. This Living Book about Life covers many of these facets of the unborn human. By incorporating academic articles as well as material from social, news and other digital media sites spanning historical medical, contemporary medical, sociocultural, bioethical and legal perspectives, The Unborn Human demonstrates the various and diverse contexts in which knowledges, concepts, objects and practices work together to configure embryos and foetuses.

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LIVING BOOKS ABOUT LIFE
http://www.livingbooksaboutlife.org

Living Books About Life (http://www.livingbooksaboutlife.org) was launched by Open Humanities Press (OHP) (http://openhumanitiespress.org) in October 2011.

Funded by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC), and edited by Gary Hall, Joanna Zylinska and Clare Birchall, Living Books About Life is a series of curated, open access books about life -- with life understood both philosophically and biologically -- which provide a bridge between the humanities and the sciences. Produced by a globally-distributed network of writers and editors, the books in the series repackage existing open access science research by clustering it around selected topics whose unifying theme is life: e.g., air, agriculture, bioethics, cosmetic surgery, electronic waste, energy, neurology and pharmacology.

Open Humanities Press is a non-profit, international Open Access publishing collective specializing in critical and cultural theory. OHP was formed by academics to overcome the current crisis in scholarly publishing that threatens intellectual freedom and academic rigor worldwide. OHP journals are academically certified by OHP’s independent board of international scholars. All OHP publications are peer-reviewed, published under open access licenses, and freely and immediately available online at http://openhumanitiespress.org.

Photomediations machine

We are pleased to announce the launch of Photomediations Machine (http://www.photomediationsmachine.net): a curated online space where the dynamic relations of mediation as performed in photography and other media can be encountered, experienced and engaged.

Photomediations Machine adopts a process-based approach to image making by tracing the technological, biological, cultural, social and political flows of mediation that produce photographic objects. Showcasing theoretical and practical work at the intersections of art and mainstream practices, Photomediations Machine is both an archive of mediations past and a site of production of media as-we-do-not-know-them-yet. Photomediations Machine is non-commercial, non-profit and fully open access.

Curated by Joanna Zylinska and Ting Ting Cheng, Photomediations Machine has an International Advisory Board which includes Katherine Behar, Lisa Cartwright, Alberto López Cuenca, Asbjørn Grønstad, Richard Grusin, Sarah Kember, Max Liljefors, Melissa Miles, Nicholas Mirzoeff, W.J.T. Mitchell, Luiza Nader, Nina Sellars, Jonathan Shaw, Katrina Sluis, Marquard Smith, Hito Steyerl and Bernadette Wegenstein. It is a sister project to the online open access journal Culture Machine (http://www.culturemachine.net), established in 1999.

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Photomediations Machine invites the following types of submissions:

• Visual projects that fit the photomediations theme (selection of images, links to video hosted elsewhere). We accept submissions from artists themselves as well as from theorists and curators. All visual projects need to be accompanied by a short description or a contextualisation piece.

• Short articles (up to 2000 words, including references) on any aspect of photomediations, accompanied by one or more images.

• Reviews (up to 1400 words, including references) of any relevant exhibitions, events or publications, accompanied by one or more images.

• Interviews with artists, theorists, activists and curators (up to 2000 words) working at the interstices of photography and media, accompanied by one or more images.

• Announcements / news about current exhibitions, installations, events and publications that will be of interests to Photomediations Machine’s readers (100-500 words), accompanied by one or more images.

Please submit all text as a Word or rtf document and all images as low-res jpegs (1024×768 px; 72dpi). For written submissions, please use the Culture Machine style sheet. Authors need to clear copyright to all images used. Decisions about individual submissions will be made by Photomediations Machine’s curators in consultation with members of its International Advisory Board and external advisors.

Please send your submission to: mail@photomediationsmachine.net

Website: http://www.photomediationsmachine.net
Twitter: @Photomediations

Open book digital humanities series

Open Book Publishers is proud to announce the launch of a Digital Humanities Series. The series is overseen by an international board of experts and its books subjected to rigorous peer review. Its objective is to encourage and support the development of experimental monographs, edited volumes and collections that extend the boundaries of the field and help to strengthen its interrelations with the other disciplines of the arts, humanities and beyond. It will offer digital humanists a dedicated
venue for high-quality, Open Access publication.

Proposals in any area of the Digital Humanities are invited. For further details and instructions on how to submit please see www.openbookpublishers.com.

Editorial Board

Paul Arthur, Kathleen Fitzpatrick, Julia Flanders, Gary Hall, Brett Hirsch, Matthew L. Jockers, John Lavagnino, Willard McCarty, Roberto Rosselli del Turco and Elke Teich.

Open Book Publishers

Open Book is an independent academic publisher, run by scholars who are committed to making high-quality research available to readers around the world. We publish monographs and textbooks in the Humanities and Social Sciences, and offer the academic excellence of a traditional press, with the speed, convenience and accessibility of digital publishing. All our books are available to read for free online. To date we have 30 books in print, over 215,000 visits to these books via the Web and readers from over 125 countries. See www.openbookpublishers.com for more information.

'We are all game-changers now': open education - a study in disruption

‘We Are All Game-Changers Now’: Open Education - A Study in Disruption is being written as part of an ongoing collaboration between Mute Publishing and the Media Department at Coventry School of Art & Design. It has emerged from a shared interest in, among other things, the ability of new forms of networked technologies, open access digital publishing, collaborative web tools and sociable spaces to enhance educational activity.

The background to these are Coventry University’s Centre for Disruptive Media and key theme of Open Media, and Mute Publishing’s explorations of the relationships  between creativity, technology and society since its founding in 1994.  The efforts of these respective organisations include, but are not limited to:

●    Coventry University’s proactive stance on open access and open education, including:
○    A bold, yet critically nuanced, Open Media policy
○    The Media Department’s Open Access mandate – the 3rd Green OA Mandate for a Humanities Department in the World,  1st Nationally, UK's 24th Green OA Mandate, Planet's 92nd
○    The Media Department’s ‘Open’ courses, including  PICBOD, PHONAR, and Creative Media Activism, the longest running of which dates back to January 2010

•    Further Open Media-related initiatives, i.e.
■    Liquid Theory TV
■    The Jisc funded Living Books About Life series
■    The University’s Digital Media Grand Challenge initiative and newly established Centre for Disruptive Media

●    Mute Publishing’s eighteen-year archive of editorial, providing analysis of networked technologies’ effects on culture and society, including:
○    A back catalogue of 6000+ web articles
○    Existing publishing output of 50+ magazines, five books, a range of special projects and filmed live events
●    Mute Publishing’s ongoing experiments with digital publishing, e.g.:
○    changes in the material form of the print magazine (six different formats)
○    exploring the relationship of print issues to online content/archives/user activity
○    developing publishing tools and digital services for audience/community/users
●    Mute Publishing’s open software development under the name ‘OpenMute’

In Spring 2012, Coventry decided to structure the relationship more actively so as to draw out a strategic direction for its collaboration with Mute Publishing. It drew up a commission for Mute Publishing to work with the department’s Open Media Group to produce the following multi-part project, designed as a critical experiment with both collaborative, processual writing and concise, medium-length forms of shared attention:

1.    A collaboratively written book engaging critically with the burgeoning phenomenon of Open Education (OpenCourseWare, MOOCs,  TED, Wikiversity, The Public School et al), co-authored by Coventry’s Open Media Group and Mute Publishing.

2.    A public, open access, collaborative research wiki, where an initial, provisional, very much tbc version of this book on Open Education can be made available as it emerges and begins to take shape as part of the Culture Machine Liquid Books series from Open Humanities Press. Publishing an initial version of ‘We Are All Game-Changers Now’: Open Education - A Study in Disruption  on a research wiki  is also designed ensure it is openly available to be read, commented upon, edited, updated, rewritten, reversioned and used in the production of derivative works by the wider community of researchers, teachers and learners. 

The second part of this project, the ‘We Are All Game-Changers Now’: Open Education - A Study in Disruption collaborative research wiki, is available here.

For more on Mute and its history, see Nick Thoburn, ‘Ceci n’est pas un magazine: The Politics of Hybrid Media in Mute Magazine’, New Media and Society, December 5, 2011; and Julian Stallabrass, ‘Digital Partisans: Mute and the Cultural Politics of the Net’, New Left Review, 2012.

For a post-digital post-humanities

(This is the second part of a post on the MediaCommons front page - the first part is here. It's a response to their survey question: What are the major social/legal/professional stakes with sharing online? The original post and subsequent responses can be found here, where you are also invited to join in the discussion around this question.)

To illustrate what I mean as far as the author, originality, and the human are concerned, let’s take as an example Graham Harman’s Prince of Networks. This book is published on an open access basis by re.press using the kind of Creative Commons license that would presumably be considered by some to have been more suitable for ‘Declaration’.  In Prince of Networks, Harman extends and develops an earlier account of ‘The Importance of Bruno Latour for Philosophy’, in which he presents Latour as having given us ‘possibly the first object-oriented philosophy’. Harman does so on the grounds that ‘there is no privilege for a unique human subject’, for Latour. ‘Instead, you and I are actants, Immanuel Kant is an actant, and dogs, strawberries, tsunamis, and telegrams are actants. With this single step’, Harman writes, ‘a total democracy of objects replaces the long tyranny of human beings in philosophy’.  However, even though Prince of Networks is available open access, that doesn’t mean a network of people, objects or actants can take Harman’s text, rewrite and improve it, and in this way produce a work derived from it that can then be legally published. Since Harman has chosen to publish his book under a Creative Commons BY-NC-ND licence, any such act of rewriting would infringe his claim to copyright. This applies to both the right Harman wishes to retain to be identified as the author of Prince of Networks, and to have it attributed to him precisely as a unique human subject; but also to Harman’s right of integrity, which enables him as a singular human being to claim the original ideas its contains as his intellectual property, and which grants him the privilege of refusing to allow the original, fixed and final form of Prince of Networks to be modified or distorted by others, be they humans or objects.

Granted, there’s probably no quick or easy way of responding to this raising of the stakes for theory and philosophy. To be fair, such social/legal/professional blindspots are far from confined to Hardt and Negri, Harman, or Latour for that matter, who likewise continues to act as if he is a modern in this respect, even as he insists we have never been modern.  In fact, oversights and elisions of this kind affect the majority of those theorists and philosophers who are currently attempting to replace the tyranny of the human with an emphasis on the nonhuman, the posthuman, the inhuman and the multi-scalar logics of the ‘anthropocene’.  Thanks to the way in which they, too, have responded to the issue of the social/legal/professional implications of sharing – whether it’s on a ‘Copyright…All rights reserved’ or Creative Commons basis - such ‘post-theory theories’ and philosophies continue to be intricately bound up with the human in the very performance of their attempt to think through and beyond it.

Be that as it may, the high stakes raised by your survey remain - for hopefully this post, too, is more than merely a cheap shot.  So let me raise a question that’s also an exhortation: How as theorists and philosophers can we perform our work, business, role and practices differently – to the point where we might actually confront, think through and assume (rather than marginalise, repress, ignore or take for granted) some of the implications of sharing online for our ideas of authorship, subjectivity, originality, the text, the book, intellectual property, copyright, piracy – and, indeed, the human?

In other words, can we work towards the development, not of a digital humanities, but rather what might be called (rather clumsily, I admit)  a post- digital post-humanities. What would something of this kind look like? What forms could it take? Would such a post-digital post-humanities not likewise call for 'new modes of address, new styles of publishing and authoring, and new formats and speeds of distribution', to borrow the words of Tom Cohen and Claire Colebrook from their Critical Climate Change series regarding the possibility of extinction?

One possible starting point for thinking about how we might address this issue is provided by Lawrence Liang in his essay ‘The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Book’, which appeared in Gaelle Krikorian and Amy Kapczynski’s edited collection from 2010, Access to Knowledge In the Age of Intellectual Property. There Liang recounts how ‘Indian culture does not draw a distinction between an agent who performs an action and the action that the agent performs'. Instead, 'an agent is constituted by the actions that he or she performs, or an agent is the actions performed and nothing more’. Translating this idea into the context of Western thought we can see the focus now, rather than being on what a theorist or philosopher writes about the nonhuman, the posthuman, the inhuman, is much more on the theory and philosophy of the nonhuman, the posthuman, the inhuman - or the commons, commoning and communism - that he or she acts out and performs.