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.

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.

An exploration of the ways that shifting relations between materiality and language bring about different forms of politics in Tehran In Revolution of Things, Kusha Sefat traces a dynamism between materiality and language that sheds light on how the merger of the two permeates politics. To show how shifting relations between things and terms form the grounds for different modes of action, Sefat reconstructs the political history of postrevolutionary Iran at the intersection of everyday objects and words. Just as Islamism fashioned its own objects in Tehran during the 1980s, he explains, tyrannical objects generated a distinct form of Islamism by means of their material properties; everyday things from walls to shoes to foods were active political players that helped consolidate the Islamic Republic. Moreover, President Rafsanjani’s “liberalization” in the 1990s was based not merely on state policies and post-Islamist ideologies but also on the unlikely things—including consumer products from the West—that engendered and sustained “liberalism” in Tehran. Sefat shows how provincial vocabularies transformed into Islamist and post-Islamist discourses through the circulation of international objects. The globalization of objects, he argues, was constitutive of the different forms that politics took in Tehran, with each constellation affording and foreclosing distinct modes of agency. Sefat’s intention is not to alter historical facts about the Islamic Republic but to show how we can rethink the matter of those facts. By bringing the recent “material turn” into conversation with the canons of structural analysis, poststructuralist theory, sociolinguistics, and Middle East studies, Sefat offers a unique perspective on Iran’s revolution and its aftermath.

Make microcontrollers, PCs, servers, and smartphones talk to each other. Building electronic projects that interact with the physical world is good fun. But when the devices you've built start to talk to each other, things really get interesting. With 33 easy-to-build projects, Making Things Talk shows you how to get your gadgets to communicate with you and your environment. It’s perfect for people with little technical training but a lot of interest. Maybe you're a science teacher who wants to show students how to monitor the weather in several locations at once. Or a sculptor looking to stage a room of choreographed mechanical sculptures. In this expanded edition, you’ll learn how to form networks of smart devices that share data and respond to commands. Call your home thermostat with a smartphone and change the temperature. Create your own game controllers that communicate over a network. Use ZigBee, Bluetooth, Infrared, and plain old radio to transmit sensor data wirelessly. Work with Arduino 1.0, Processing, and PHP—three easy-to-use, open source environments. Write programs to send data across the Internet, based on physical activity in your home, office, or backyard. Whether you want to connect simple home sensors to the Internet, or create a device that can interact wirelessly with other gadgets, this book explains exactly what you need.

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.

This book offers models and frameworks to analyze your service delivery systems as a whole. It presents the framework to solve customer problems by delivering the right knowledge at the right time to the right place and take advantage of the efficiency that technology and algorithms offer. Why do so many brilliant plans fail to deliver in practice? Why can’t your employees just do what you want them to do? In most cases, because the operations eco-system in which those plans must be deployed fails to fully understand the problem that needs to be solved. The fourth industrial revolution is seeing advances in Artificial Intelligence industrialize the service sector. But, despite the cost-cutting that these advances offer firms are still struggling to stay competitive. That is because they think that cost-cutting delivers increased efficiency whereas it is the other way around: increased efficiency cuts costs. And the heart of efficiency in delivering services is people and their knowledge. As industrialization drives ever more standardized offerings and ever little human contact it is in those rare moments of human interaction where the greatest opportunity to add or destroy value lies. It is human brains and the knowledge they contain that are best suited to problem-solving and individualizing client solutions. The real competitive edge will become the ability to foresee and individualize problem-solving. To do this, firms must start thinking of knowledge as inventory – who knows what, who needs to know what and where and when do they need to know it.

Offers a collection of essays on philosophies and strategies for defining, leading, and managing projects. This book explains to technical and non-technical readers alike what it takes to get through a large software or web development project. It does not cite specific methods, but focuses on philosophy and strategy.

What if value is neither an intrinsic quality of an object, nor a reflection of a subjects preferencesbut rather something that is organized and brought into existence through mechanisms, technologies and practices of valuation? This edited book addresses the question of valuation theoretically and through empirical analyses of diverse objects of valuations, such as university ranking lists, ice skating scoring, wind power, insurances, gold and big data. The theoretical inspiration is interdisciplinary and the volume brings together scholars from economic sociology, accounting, organization studies, and science and technology studies with the aim of understanding through which practices and processes things are made valuable. Valuing is understood as a plural activity where pricing things is just one way of signifying value. Socio-economic reality is constituted through different orders of worth that are grounded in the way people praise and prize things. The book is arranged around five concerns that underpin the debate about making things valuable. These concerns are: calculating/economizing; commensurating/switching; visualizing/hiding; modelling/tracing; and knowing/disciplining.

Cut, cook, draw, dye, dream, snap and spin! Who better to make art with than today's best-loved artists? This absorbing book has been created by a selection of the world's leading contemporary artists and provides projects and activities designed to challenge and expand your approach to making art. You will never again find yourself short of ideas for things to make and do! Make recipes by Olafur Eliasson and listen to how they sound; create a spotty, squirmy salamander with Monster Chetwynd; trace meditative drawings and explore the power of repetition with Yayoi Kusama; build a living collage with Linder; or get stuck into some classic puzzle activities turned on their heads by Jeremy Deller. Each activity draws on the artist's own practice and is supported by guidance and advice from the artists themselves.