UC Berkeley Library

This open access volume is the first dedicated to action within bioarchaeology and cognate disciplines, with the aim of fostering social and political change. The editors bring together a diverse range of bioarchaeologists and related practitioners whose work engages with some of the most pressing social issues facing humanity today, including infectious disease, structural violence, healthcare and inequitable access to resources, racial injustice, ethics, food insecurity, displacement, equitable education, and the intersections of these challenges with identities such as race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, class, and disability. These issues explored in this volume are at the heart of the United Nations 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, adopted in 2015, and encapsulated in the 17 UN Sustainable Development Goals. Each chapter makes explicit connections to contemporary issues and demonstrates how our work can be used to effect social change, offering practical steps for developing an activist lens in research, practice, and academia. This volume will be of interest to academics, practitioners, and students in bioarchaeology and related disciplines.

The book aims to facilitate the development of circular bioeconomy education, research, policy, and engineering practices in global communities to benefit undergraduate and graduate students and professionals. The book is expected to guide future farming activities, reshape urban-rural relationships, promote economic regeneration, and improve science-based regulations and policies to ensure socio-demographic justice and resilience in climate-vulnerable communities. The book will stimulate the investment in new natural resource-based industries and contribute to addressing the challenges of climate change, nutrition security, biodiversity conservation, and realization of the net zero emission goal.

Nordic Capitalism shows how democratic capitalism supports freedom, shared prosperity, and sustainability through a comparative analysis of Nordic and American capitalisms. Drawing on real-world examples and personal experience, Robert Gavin Strand distills ten core lessons from the Nordic context to advance a more just, dignified, and sustainable form of capitalism. He examines how Nordic nations consistently lead in the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) rankings and societal well-being indicators, and how Nordic companies frequently top sustainability and stakeholder performance rankings. Challenging the assertion that there is 'no alternative' to American-style capitalism rooted in neoliberalism, he dispels the mischaracterization of Nordic societies as 'socialist.' Blending rigorous scholarship with compelling storytelling, this book speaks to scholars, business leaders, policymakers, students, and concerned citizens. The Nordic variety of capitalism serves as a North Star – offering practical guidance and hope for realizing sustainable capitalism.

Co-authored by eminent scholars in the field, this book surveys the processes and outcomes of child welfare services in the US, drawing global parallels in order to capture the challenges, tensions, and opportunities facing child welfare services.

Artificial Humanities explores how literature, history, and art can deepen our understanding of artificial intelligence and its development. By examining fictional representations of AI in parallel with actual technological developments, Nina Beguš presents a novel interdisciplinary framework for understanding the cultural, philosophical, and ethical dimensions of AI. She traces connections from Eliza Doolittle to ELIZA the chatbot and current language models, incorporates Slavic fictional examples from the Pygmalion paradigm, and compares mid-century science fiction and recent Hollywood films with contemporary developments in social robotics and virtual beings.

Highlighting the impact of human-like AI design, from gendered virtual assistants to romanticized social robots, the book shows how these technologies intersect with longstanding humanistic questions about the concepts of creativity and language as well as the relations between humans and machines. Additionally, the book explores AI’s applications in medical fields, particularly psychiatry and neurotechnology, including how AI interacts with the human body and mind to address conditions like paralysis. By emphasizing the philosophical and cultural implications of these technologies, Beguš highlights the need for responsible innovation that prioritizes human well-being as well as machine potential outside of human imitation. Accessible and thought-provoking, Artificial Humanities offers tools for analyzing and assessing technologies while they are being developed and invites readers to see how the humanities can guide us toward a more thoughtful future for AI.

Nina Beguš is Researcher and Lecturer at the Center for Science, Technology, Medicine & Society at the University of California, Berkeley.

In September 1666, a fire sparked in a bakery on Pudding Lane grew until it had destroyed four-fifths of central London. The rebuilding efforts that followed not only launched the careers of some of London's most famous architects, but also transformed Londoners' relationship to their city by underscoring the ways that people could shape a city's spaces—and the ways that a city's spaces could shape its people. Movable Londons looks to the Restoration theater to understand how the dispossessed made London into a modern city after the Great Fire of 1666 and how the introduction of changeable scenery in theaters altered how Londoners conceptualized the city. Fawcett makes a claim for the centrality of unplanned spaces and the role of the Restoration theater in articulating those spaces as the modern city emerged and argues that movable scenery revolutionized London's public theaters, inviting audiences to observe how the performers—many of them hailing from the same communities as their characters—navigated the stage.

This book emerges from a seminar convened by Simon Gaunt as part of the major European Research Council-funded project The Values of French Language and Literature in the European Middle Ages (TVOF), which he led from 2015 to 2021. With participants from universities in Belgium, France, Germany, Italy,

Switzerland, and North America, this seminar met in London three times a year to discuss medieval topics ranging from the use of French outside of what is now France, the distinction between history and fiction, differences between romance varieties, and the importance of manuscript culture in the dissemination of cultural values. These topics are addressed here by leading scholars of medieval literature and romance philology, including both seminar members and a wider community of researchers who collaborated with Gaunt. After his untimely passing in 2021, Gaunt’s ideas live on in a series of dialogues he established across traditionally polarised positions in studies of medieval romance languages and literatures. These essays both honour his memory and continue the conversations he started.

Fear of a Dead White Planet asks: How does one study when the planet is on fire? The More Worlds Collective challenges the contemporary rush to planetary technofixes for environmental emergency. Instead, it tracks how such planetary-science frames are enmeshed in the longstanding projects of White Supremacy, settler colonialism, and epistemological violence. Calling for unlearning and joined-up study, the collective reclaims terraforming from off-earth engineering schemes to think through how our more modest efforts to study differently are also world-making and world-breaking. In orienting its work toward terra and formation, the collective commits to a place-based, non universal study scaled at levels both intimate and massive. Through its serious but unruly methods, Fear of a Dead White Planet invites readers to recognize and conjure alternate worlds in and around the university.

This volume presents the results of a collaborative eco-archaeological project that examines evidence for Indigenous landscape and seascape stewardship practices over 7000 years on the Central California coast. The goal of this work is to develop a better understanding of practices employed by local tribes to enhance the diversity, productivity, and sustainability of culturally important plants and animals in tribal lands and waters. The centerpiece of the project is the Amah Mutsun Tribal Band (AMTB), whose members are Indigenous to the area and descend from survivors of the historic Franciscan mission’s Santa Cruz and San Juan Bautista. 

They are working on developing a better understanding of their ancestral stewardship activities that may serve as a historical baseline for revitalizing Indigenous practices on the Central California coast today.