A controversial, timely reassessment of the environmentalist agenda by outstanding historians, scientists, and critics. In a lead essay that powerfully states the broad argument of the book, William Cronon writes that the environmentalist goal of wilderness preservation is conceptually and politically wrongheaded. Among the ironies and entanglements resulting from this goal are the sale of nature in our malls through the Nature Company, and the disputes between working people and environmentalists over spotted owls and other objects of species preservation. The problem is that we haven't learned to live responsibly in nature. The environmentalist aim of legislating humans out of the wilderness is no solution. People, Cronon argues, are inextricably tied to nature, whether they live in cities or countryside. Rather than attempt to exclude humans, environmental advocates should help us learn to live in some sustainable relationship with nature. It is our home.

An anthology of feminist cyberfiction and theoretical and critical writings on gender and technoculture. Most writing on cyberculture is dominated by two almost mutually exclusive visions: the heroic image of the male outlaw hacker and the utopian myth of a gender-free cyberworld. Reload offers an alternative picture of cyberspace as a complex and contradictory place where there is oppression as well as liberation. It shows how cyberpunk's revolutionary claims conceal its ultimate conservatism on matters of class, gender, and race. The cyberfeminists writing here view cyberculture as a social experiment with an as-yet-unfulfilled potential to create new identities, relationships, and cultures. The book brings together women's cyberfiction—fiction that explores the relationship between people and virtual technologies—and feminist theoretical and critical investigations of gender and technoculture. From a variety of viewpoints, the writers consider the effects of rapid and profound technological change on culture, in particular both the revolutionary and reactionary effects of cyberculture on women's lives. They also explore the feminist implications of the cyborg, a human-machine hybrid. The writers challenge the conceptual and institutional rifts between high and low culture, which are embedded in the texts and artifacts of cyberculture.

In this age of DNA computers and artificial intelligence, information is becoming disembodied even as the "bodies" that once carried it vanish into virtuality. While some marvel at these changes, envisioning consciousness downloaded into a computer or humans "beamed" Star Trek-style, others view them with horror, seeing monsters brooding in the machines. In How We Became Posthuman, N. Katherine Hayles separates hype from fact, investigating the fate of embodiment in an information age. Hayles relates three interwoven stories: how information lost its body, that is, how it came to be conceptualized as an entity separate from the material forms that carry it; the cultural and technological construction of the cyborg; and the dismantling of the liberal humanist "subject" in cybernetic discourse, along with the emergence of the "posthuman." Ranging widely across the history of technology, cultural studies, and literary criticism, Hayles shows what had to be erased, forgotten, and elided to conceive of information as a disembodied entity. Thus she moves from the post-World War II Macy Conferences on cybernetics to the 1952 novel Limbo by cybernetics aficionado Bernard Wolfe; from the concept of self-making to Philip K. Dick's literary explorations of hallucination and reality; and from artificial life to postmodern novels exploring the implications of seeing humans as cybernetic systems. Although becoming posthuman can be nightmarish, Hayles shows how it can also be liberating. From the birth of cybernetics to artificial life, How We Became Posthuman provides an indispensable account of how we arrived in our virtual age, and of where we might go from here.

Futurenatural brings together leading theorists of culture and science to discuss the concept of 'nature'. Recent developments in biotechnologies, electronic media and ecological politics are discussed.We are living in an age when 'nature' seems to be on the brink of extinction yet, at the same time, 'nature' is becoming increasingly ubiquitous and unstable as a category for representation and debate.F uturenatural brings together leading theorists of culture and science to discuss the concept of 'nature' - its past, present and future. Contributors discuss the impact on our daily life of recent developments in biotechnologies, electronic media and ecological politics. Increasingly, scientific theories and models have been taken up as cultural metaphores that have material effects in transforming 'ways of seeing' and 'structures of feeling'.The book addresses the issue of whether political and cultural debates about the body and the environment can take place without reference to 'nature' or the 'natural'. This collection considers how we might 'think' a future developing from emergent scientific theories and discourses. What cultural forms may be produced when new knowledges challenge and undermine traditional ways of conceiving the 'natural' ?

Artificial Knowing challenges the masculine slant in the Artificial Intelligence (AI) view of the world. Alison Adam admirably fills the large gap in science and technology studies by showing us that gender bias is inscribed in AI-based computer systems. Her treatment of feminist epistemology, focusing on the ideas of the knowing subject, the nature of knowledge, rationality and language, are bound to make a significant and powerful contribution to AI studies. Drawing from theories by Donna Haraway and Sherry Turkle, and using tools of feminist epistemology, Adam provides a sustained critique of AI which interestingly re-enforces many of the traditional criticisms of the AI project. Artificial Knowing is an esential read for those interested in gender studies, science and technology studies, and philosophical debates in AI.

The Visible Human Project is a critical investigation of the spectacular, three-dimensional recordings of real human bodies - dissected, photographed and converted into visual data files - made by the US National Library of Medicine in Baltimore. Catherine Waldby uses new ideas from cultural studies, science studies and social studies of the computer to situate the Visible Human Project in its historical and cultural context, and to consider the meanings such an object has within a computerised culture. In this fascinating and important book, Catherine Waldby explores how advances in medical technologies have changed the way we view and study the human body, and places the VHP within the history of technologies such as the X-ray and CT-scan, which allow us to view the human interior. Bringing together medical conceptions of the human body with theories of visual culture from Foucault to Donna Haraway, Waldby links the VHP to a range of other biomedical projects, such as the Human Genome Project and cloning, which approach living bodies as data sources. She argues that the VHP is an example of the increasingly blurred distinction between `living' and 'dead' human bodies, as the bodies it uses are digitally preserved as a resource for living bodies, and considers how computer-based biotechnologies affect both medical and non-medical meanings of the body's life and death, its location and its limits.

This handbook provides an accessible overview of the most important issues in information and computer ethics. It covers: foundational issues and methodological frameworks; theoretical issues affecting property, privacy, anonymity, and security; professional issues and the information-related professions; responsibility issues and risk assessment; regulatory issues and challenges; access and equity issues. Each chapter explains and evaluates the central positions and arguments on the respective issues, and ends with a bibliography that identifies the most important supplements available on the topic.

One of the founders of the posthumanities, Donna J. Haraway is professor in the History of Consciousness program at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Author of many books and widely read essays, including the now-classic essay "The Cyborg Manifesto," she received the J.D. Bernal Prize in 2000, a lifetime achievement award from the Society for Social Studies in Science. Thyrza Nicholas Goodeve is a professor of Art History at the School of Visual Arts.

The body has come to provide a central site for theory and debate from social theory to cultural studies. This important and compelling book looks beyond psychology's traditional biological body to explore what insights can be gained from recent theories of embodiment. Taking the body as inscribed by social and disciplinary practices, leading contributors explore a wide range of psychological topics in new and challenging ways. Questions surrounding health, gender, history and culture are addressed in contexts such as the psychology of pain, the treatment of anorexia nervosa, and psychology's relationship to transgender activists. The material in this volume was previously published as a Special Issue of th