In general, “development” denotes movement or growth toward something better in the future. International development—widespread in the decades following World War II—was an effort at purposeful changein landscapes around the world. Contributors to this volume argue that these projects constituted an effort to transplant modernity, such as knowledge or technology, from places seen as more developed to places perceived as un- or underdeveloped. During its heyday, international development included not just dams, roads, health programs, and agricultural projects but also animal husbandry schemes, urban development, and wildlife protection plans. Projects often succeeded or failed because of existing environmental conditions, and in turn, these programs remade—or tried to remake—the land, water, wildlife, and people around them. From American-directed failures in water engineering in Afghanistan to the impact of livestock epidemics on economic growth in East Africa, the chapters in Transplanting Modernity question how science, technology, and faith in Western notions of progress have influenced the pace, scope, and scale of development.

This dissertation explores how modern journalism took shape in "semi-colonial" China in the early twentieth century, with a focus on the influence of the American model of professional journalism. This work presents a methodological model that combines discourse analysis and social network analysis. Discourse analysis shows how early Chinese Confucian-liberal intellectuals seized upon, and selectively drew upon, American ideas of journalistic professionalism in the larger quest of national modernization. Social network analysis examines the roles played by the complex networks and interactions among intellectuals, educators, and journalists from China and the United States in the introduction of the American model of journalism. Situating the cultural transfer in China's semi-colonial condition and its urge for modernization, this project reveals how the colonial encounters created American-inspired but distinctly indigenous notions of modern journalism in early twentieth-century China.

This book focuses on the rise of sharing and collaboration practices among peers in Spanish digital cultures and social movements in the wake of Spain's financial meltdown of 2008.

As the Year 2024 has already passed half, I sincerely hope and pray for world peace and for people to live and work in peace. But looking ahead, I believe the future will still not be peaceful. The Russian-Ukrainian war is still raging, and the people are suffering. The Israeli-Hamas conflict seems to have no signs of stopping, and the US election is surging. As I said before, the three major divisions facing the world are presented at the same time this year: the Russian-Ukrainian war is a major division between the democratic and dictatorial camps, the US election is a major left-right division, and the Israeli-Hamas conflict has surpassed the left-right division and the democracy-dictatorship division. Is the world heading for doomsday ？ We wait and see.

Human and animal lives intersect, whether through direct physical contact or by inhabiting the same space at a different time. Environmental humanities scholars have begun investigating these relationships through the emerging field of multispecies studies, building on decades of work in animal history, feminist studies, and Indigenous epistemologies. Contributors to this volume consider the entangled human-animal relationships of a complex multispecies world, where domesticated animals, wild animals, and people cross paths, creating hybrid naturecultures. Technology, they argue, structures how animals and humans share spaces. From clothing to cars to computers, technology acts as a mediator and connector of lives across time and space. It facilitates ways of looking at, measuring, moving, and killing, as well as controlling, containing, conserving, and cooperating with animals. Sharing Spaces challenges us to analyze how technology shapes human relationships with the nonhuman world, exploring nonhuman animals as kin, companions, food, transgressors, entertainment, and tools.

Transplantation Gothic is a shadow cultural history of transplantation, as mediated through medical writing, science fiction, life writing and visual arts in a Gothic mode, from the nineteenth-century to the present. The works explore the experience of donor/suppliers, recipients and practitioners, and simultaneously express transfer-related suffering and are complicit in its erasure. Examining texts from Europe, North America and India, the book resists exoticising predatorial tissue economies and considers fantasies of harvest as both product and symbol of structural ruination under neoliberal capitalism. In their efforts to articulate bioengineered hybridity, these works are not only anxious but speculative. The book will be of interest to academics and students researching Gothic studies, science fiction, critical medical humanities and cultural studies of transplantation.

Winner of the George Perkins Marsh Prize Winner of the Stuart L. Bernath Prize Winner of the W. Turrentine Jackson Award Winner of the British Association of American Studies Prize “Extraordinary...Deftly rearranges the last century and a half of American history in fresh and useful ways.” —Los Angeles Review of Books “A smart, original, and ambitious book. Black demonstrates that the Interior Department has had a far larger, more invasive, and more consequential role in the world than one would expect.” —Brian DeLay, author of War of a Thousand Deserts When considering the story of American power, the Department of the Interior rarely comes to mind. Yet it turns out that a government agency best known for managing natural resources and operating national parks has constantly supported America’s imperial aspirations. Megan Black’s pathbreaking book brings to light the surprising role Interior has played in pursuing minerals around the world—on Indigenous lands, in foreign nations, across the oceans, even in outer space. Black shows how the department touted its credentials as an innocuous environmental-management organization while quietly satisfying America’s insatiable demand for raw materials. As presidents trumpeted the value of self-determination, this almost invisible outreach gave the country many of the benefits of empire without the burden of a heavy footprint. Under the guise of sharing expertise with the underdeveloped world, Interior scouted tin sources in Bolivia and led lithium surveys in Afghanistan. Today, it promotes offshore drilling and even manages a satellite that prospects for Earth’s resources from outer space. “Offers unprecedented insights into the depth and staying power of American exceptionalism...as generations of policymakers sought to extend the reach of U.S. power globally while emphatically denying that the United States was an empire.” —Penny Von Eschen, author of Satchmo Blows Up the World “Succeeds in showing both the central importance of minerals in the development of American power and how the realities of empire could be obscured through a focus on modernization and the mantra of conservation.” —Ian Tyrrell, author of Crisis of the Wasteful Nation