Martin Döring - Böcker

The 2001 Foot and Mouth Disease epidemic in the UK, during which millions of animals were culled over a nine-month period, had a devastating and long-lasting impact on individuals and communities. In 2002 the European Parliament noted that policymakers need to have a better understanding of the social and psychological impact of such events on adults and children, on farmers and non-farmers. Although many studies about FMD have been published since 2001, this is the first to offer a detailed examination of the various ways in which the outbreak affected the fabric of rural life and rural culture across classes and across generations. Drawing on the experiences of farmers, the media, artists, writers, children and churches, this collection provides a space for academic inquiry, political and poetic reflection and artistic expression.

This edited volume contributes to recent theoretical work in ecolinguistics that treats language as, not about nature, but of nature.Through a dialogical interplay of theoretical and empirical work, the chapters apply ecological concepts of language, languaging, and emplacement to a multiplicity of issues, settings, and place-worlds. Empirically, the chapters meander through a universe of chimpanzees engaged in problem solving, children playing marbles, political constitutions, agricultural dictionaries, Sicilian nature reserves, children’s experiences of devastating outbreaks of foot and mouth disease, expressions of sorrow across closed borders, and the linguistic conquest of uninhabited islands. By attending to locale, sense of place, and location across this diversity, the volume evokes new empirical, methodological, and practical horizons that allow ecolinguists to ask how people and their emplacement are affected by language and languaging, and how the effects of practices impact on, not just human lifeworlds, but also trillions of bioecologies.This book will be of interest to students and scholars interested in ecolinguistics, discourse analysis, applied linguistics, language contact, environmental humanities, and human and social geography.

Moving beyond a more traditional view of language as a discrete sociocultural and cognitive entity that distorts our understanding of surrounding ecologies, this book argues that the starting point for ecolinguistics is an appreciation of language as not just about nature, but of nature. Exploring this conceptual change in the field, the book presents a process view in which language is substituted by languaging, emphasising the bioecologies that we cohabit with numerous other species. It puts forward this perspective by looking at the theoretical considerations behind the understanding of languaging as bioecological, and through examining languaging in various contexts and places. Drawing on examples from across the world, it addresses topics such as climate catastrophes, corporate narratives, questions of ecological leadership, the bioecological implications of the COVID pandemic, and relational landscapes. It also makes use of data from across multiple bioecological settings, including the dairy and agricultural industries.

Moving beyond a more traditional view of language as a discrete sociocultural and cognitive entity that distorts our understanding of surrounding ecologies, this book argues that the starting point for ecolinguistics is an appreciation of language as not just about nature, but of nature. Exploring this conceptual change in the field, the book presents a process view in which language is substituted by languaging, emphasising the bioecologies that we cohabit with numerous other species. It puts forward this perspective by looking at the theoretical considerations behind the understanding of languaging as bioecological, and through examining languaging in various contexts and places. Drawing on examples from across the world, it addresses topics such as climate catastrophes, corporate narratives, questions of ecological leadership, the bioecological implications of the COVID pandemic, and relational landscapes. It also makes use of data from across multiple bioecological settings, including the dairy and agricultural industries.

This collective monograph aims at contributing to an improved understanding of the epistemic presumptions, sociocultural implications and historically backgrounds of the newly emerging and currently expanding approach of systems biology. In doing so, it offers empirically grounded, valuable and reflexive information about a paradigmatic shift in the biosciences for a wide range of scientists working in the interdisciplinary areas of systems biology, synthetic biology, molecular biology, biology, the philosophy of science, the sociology of science and scientific knowledge, science and technology studies, technology assessment and the like. The authors of this monograph share the theoretical methodological premise that science is a culturally and socially embedded practice which characterizes our culture as a scientific one and at the same time draws its innovative potential from its socio-cultural context. This dialectic relationship lies at the heart of the current development of systems biology which is conceived as a so-called successor of ‘-omics’ research and triggered by high-throughput information technologies. At the same time a need for a holistic conceptualization of complex biological processes emerges. The title Contextualizing Systems Biology suggests that this book analyzes the development and advent of systems biology from different theoretical and methodological perspectives. We investigate a variety of contexts ranging from the analysis of cognitive contexts (such as basic theoretical concepts) to regulative contexts (policies) to the concrete application of a systems biology in the socio-scientific context of a European research project. In empirically analyzing these different and interrelated layers and dimensions of systems biology, the scope of the book goes beyond present attempts to investigate the advent of new approaches in the biological sciences as it frames and assesses systems biology from an interdisciplinary and integratedperspective.

This collective monograph aims at contributing to an improved understanding of the epistemic presumptions, sociocultural implications and historically backgrounds of the newly emerging and currently expanding approach of systems biology. In doing so, it offers empirically grounded, valuable and reflexive information about a paradigmatic shift in the biosciences for a wide range of scientists working in the interdisciplinary areas of systems biology, synthetic biology, molecular biology, biology, the philosophy of science, the sociology of science and scientific knowledge, science and technology studies, technology assessment and the like. The authors of this monograph share the theoretical methodological premise that science is a culturally and socially embedded practice which characterizes our culture as a scientific one and at the same time draws its innovative potential from its socio-cultural context. This dialectic relationship lies at the heart of the current development of systems biology which is conceived as a so-called successor of ‘-omics’ research and triggered by high-throughput information technologies. At the same time a need for a holistic conceptualization of complex biological processes emerges. The title Contextualizing Systems Biology suggests that this book analyzes the development and advent of systems biology from different theoretical and methodological perspectives. We investigate a variety of contexts ranging from the analysis of cognitive contexts (such as basic theoretical concepts) to regulative contexts (policies) to the concrete application of a systems biology in the socio-scientific context of a European research project. In empirically analyzing these different and interrelated layers and dimensions of systems biology, the scope of the book goes beyond present attempts to investigate the advent of new approaches in the biological sciences as it frames and assesses systems biology from an interdisciplinary and integratedperspective.