Bøker utgitt av University of Minnesota Press

Exploring the connections between energy and media—and what those connections mean for our current momentEnergy and media are the entangled middles of social life—and also of each other. This volume traces the contours of both a media analytic of energy and an energy analytic of media across the cultural, environmental, and economic relations they undergird. Digital Energetics argues that media and energy require joint theorization—not only in their potential to universalize but also in the many contingent and intermeshed relations that they bind together across contemporary informational and fossil regimes. Focusing specifically on digital operations, the coauthors analyze how data and energy have jointly modulated the character of the materiality and labor of digital systems in a warming world.Anne Pasek provides a brief energy history of the bit, tracing how the electrification and digitization of American computing propelled a turn toward efficiency as both a solution and instigator of parallel crises in the workforce and the climate. Zane Griffin Talley Cooper traces these concerns within cryptographic proof-of-work systems and the heat they necessarily produce and seek to manage. Following heat through the twinned histories of thermodynamics and information theory, he argues that such systems are best approached as a paradigmatic, rather than exceptional, example of computing infrastructures. Cindy Kaiying Lin focuses on the practical and political frictions created as database and management designs move from the Global North to South, illustrating how the energy constraints and software cultures of Indonesia open new spaces of autonomy within environmental governance. Finally, Jordan B. Kinder offers a theorization of “platform energetics,” demonstrating how public energy discourses and settler land claims are entangled in the digital infrastructures of data colonialism in Canada.

Imagining anti-ableist liberation beyond the rubrics of access and inclusion In the thirty years since the Americans with Disabilities Act was signed into law, the lives of disabled people have not improved nearly as much as activists and politicians had hoped. In Crip Negativity, J. Logan Smilges shows us what’s gone wrong and what we can do to fix it.Leveling a strong critique of the category of disability and liberal disability politics, Smilges asks and imagines what horizons might exist for the liberation of those oppressed by ableism—beyond access and inclusion. Inspired by models of negativity in queer studies, Black studies, and crip theory, Smilges proposes that bad crip feelings might help all of us to care gently for one another, even as we demand more from the world than we currently believe to be possible.Forerunners: Ideas First is a thought-in-process series of breakthrough digital publications. Written between fresh ideas and finished books, Forerunners draws on scholarly work initiated in notable blogs, social media, conference plenaries, journal articles, and the synergy of academic exchange. This is gray literature publishing: where intense thinking, change, and speculation take place in scholarship.

"Settling the Boom studies how the disruptive forces of an oil boom in the northern Great Plains are contained through the extension of settler temporalities, reassertions of heteropatriarchy, and the tethering of life to the volatility of oil and its cruel optimisms. The collection reveals the results of sustained research in Williston, North Dakota, the epicenter of the "Bakken Boom.""--

The definitive field guide for understanding and identifying ferns and lycophytes in Minnesota  Rapid advances in DNA studies have given scientists new understandings of ferns and lycophytes, making books published only a decade ago now obsolete. Ferns and Lycophytes of Minnesota is the first comprehensive presentation of these oldest of land plants in Minnesota. Welby R. Smith, Minnesota state botanist, thoroughly developed this essential guide for anyone interested in learning about and identifying these ubiquitous plants that have fascinated people for centuries.Found in forests, prairies, marshes, and lakes throughout the state, ferns and lycophytes are marvelously adaptive, allowing them to inhabit and thrive in unique ecological niches, including native plant gardens. Created for natural resource professionals as well as avid gardeners, hikers, and naturalists at all levels, this easy-to-use reference enables the quick and reliable identification of each of the one hundred species of ferns and lycophytes that grow wild in Minnesota.Illustrated with more than four hundred original photographs, primarily by Richard W. Haug, this complete and up-to-date field guide includes information about how to distinguish closely related species as well as details about the ecology, distribution, and phenology of each species.