Catálogo de publicaciones

Libraries and librarians have been defined by the book throughout modern history. What happens when society increasingly lets print go in favour of storing, retrieving and manipulating electronic information? What happens after the book? After the Book explores how the academic library of the 21st Century is first and foremost a provider of electronic information services. Contemporary users expect today’s library to provide information as quickly and efficiently as other online information resources. The book argues that librarians need to change what they know, how they work, and how they are perceived in order to succeed according to the terms of this new paradigm. This title is structured into eight chapters. An introduction defines the challenge of electronic resources and makes the case for finding solutions, and following chapters cover diversions and half measures and the problem for libraries in the 21st century. Later chapters discuss solving problems through professional identity and preparation, before final chapters cover reorganizing libraries to serve users, adapting to scarcity, and the ‘digital divide’.

• Describes how electronic resources constitute both a challenge and an opportunity for libraries
• Argues that librarians can re-define themselves
• Puts the case that libraries can be reorganized to optimize electronic resource management and information services based on contemporary technology and user needs

Television as we knew it is irrevocably changing. Some are gleefully announcing the death of television, others have been less sanguine but insist that television is radically changing underneath our eyes. Several excellent publications have dealt with television's uncertain condition, but few have taken the specific question of what television's transformations mean for the discipline of Television Studies as a starting point. The essays collected in this volume aim to fill this void. Two fundamental questions string the various contributions together. First, is television really in crisis or is the present not so extraordinary when revisiting television's development? Second, should we invent new theoretical concepts or are our old ones still perfectly relevant? To answer such questions the authors in this volume take up diverse case studies, ranging from the academic series Reading Contemporary Television to Flemish Fiction, from nostalgic programming on broadcast television to YouTube, from tell-sell television shows to public television art in the 1980s.

Social democracy has made a political comeback in recent years, especially under the influence of the Third Way. Not everyone is convinced, however, that Third Way social democracy is the best means of reviving the Left's project. This book considers this dissent and offers an alternative approach. Bringing together a range of social and political theories, After the new social democracy engages with some of the most important contemporary debates regarding the present direction and future of the Left. Drawing upon egalitarian, feminist and environmental ideas it proposes that the social-democratic tradition can be renewed but only if the dominance of conservative ideas is challenged more effectively. It explores a number of issues with this aim in mind, including justice, the state, democracy, new technologies, future generations and the advances in genetics. Lively and authoritative, After the new social democracy offers a distinctive contribution to political ideas. It will appeal to all of those interested in politics, philosophy, social policy and social studies.

Considering the abundant promises and euphoric expectations (as well as apocalyptic visions of technology) that still dominate discourses on media and technology my analysis focuses on their cultural and social condition, the specific moment of their emergence, their continuous persistence, their socio-symbolic function, and their implications for social contexts of thought and perception and for hegemonic relations. The techno-deterministic notion of a ‚paradigm change', the proclamation of a ‚radically new' definition of the subject and the idea of a technically conditioned abolition of traditional dichotomies is in fact contrasted by a striking adherence to conventional and dichotome models of thought and of representation, and to the idea of an autonomous and technologically perfectionable subject. My analysis will on the one hand focus on the function of exaggerated visions of technological development (predicating a dissolution of space, time, matter and identity) and the function of ideas of ‚alternative', ‚virtual' ‚spaces' for establishing specific notions of ‚society' - indicating a specific relation of phantasm and symptom as I will show. On the other hand I will develop the definition of a political subject - not conceived as a sovereign actor, nor as an arbitrary variety, but rather as constituted on the basis of a structural impossibility inherent in language and which alone can be, due to this very impossibility or antagonism a subject of the political. In the course of this argument the notion of sexual difference will be critically revised. Furthermore I will develop a definition of agency adequate to provide the grounds and the argumentative tools for the contestability of cultural and social constructs. My emphasis will be on the interdependencies of these questions and I will base my arguments on a notion of Cyberspace that defines it as a socio-symbolic construct comprising both technical implementations as well as the respective discourses and which continuously has to be negotiated. My approach combines structural psychoanalytical theory, hegemony studies, art theory, film theory, media studies, gender studies and cultural studies. As a transdisciplinary critical theory of representation and considering its statement of problems, as well as its focus, it differs from predominant approaches to current developments of technology to create perspectives on current technological dispositives and media constellations beyond prevalent techno-euphoric or pessimistic views.