Bøger om Society

Technological development, climate change, and globalization are challenging the national institutions and modes of governance we created during the industrial era. Our old knowledge and general understanding of the world do not provide sufficient answers anymore. To maintain meaningful lives, social calm, and liberal democracy, we need to upgrade our meaning-making to match the complexity of the world we are creating.Polymodernity is an alternative to both modernity and postmodernism, a cultural code that presents itself as an opportunity if we work deliberately towards it. Polymodernity provides us with a framework for understanding ourselves and our societies in a much more complex way. It contains indigenous, premodern, modern, and postmodern cultural elements and thus provides social norms and a moral fabric for intimacy, spirituality, religion, science, and self-exploration, all at the same time. It is a way of strengthening local, national, continental, and global cultural heritage among all and thus has the potential to dismantle the fear of losing one’s culture as the economy as well as the internet and exponential technologies are disrupting our current modes of societal organization and governance. Polymodernity will thus allow us to be meaning-making at a deeper emotional level and a higher intellectual level compared to today; it will allow us a more complex understanding, which may match the complexity of the problems we need to solve. Appropriate meaning-making is the best prevention against the frustrations that generally lead to authoritarian ideologies and societal instability. Using polymodernity as the filter through which we see the world and as a template, we can create, among other things, new and appropriate education, politics, and institutions for our societies of the 21st century. A vision such as this may even give hope.

Why did Uffe Ellemann Jensen, minister of foreign affairs, call “the talented cartoonists the most professional political spin doctors of our time”? Why did the architect and controversialist Poul Henningsen want more satirical drawings that “disintegrate public morale” and especially “patriotism and other sorts of self-abuse”? And why did the poet and novelist Klaus Rifbjerg ask “cartoonists to unite/ around his breakfast table”? Well over a thousand words have been said about illustrations – also about cartoons. By the cartoonists themselves as well as by the people like Eugène Delacroix, Oscar Wilde, James Thurber and David Wallis – and even by the one and only ChatGPT. And now also by Søren Vinterberg who has discovered quotes and added some new ones – illustrated by more than fifty members of The Danish Association of Cartoonists. The 90 year anniversary book of Danish Cartoonists is finished at the stroke of a pen by showing off the works of the seven Pentel Award recipents. The book is written by Søren Vinterberg and illustrated by Mette Ehlers, Erik Petri, Bob Katzenelson, Maria Prohazka, Anna Pedersen, Brian Dall Schyth, Claus Seidel, Simon Væth, Morten Løfberg, Thomas Iburg, Ib Kjeldsmark, Rasmus Sand Høyer, Roald Als, Lars Vegas Nielsen, Jon Skræntskov, Jens Julius Hansen, Niels Bo Bojesen, Jørgen Bitsch, Thomas Thorhauge, Lars Jakobsen, Ditte Lander Ahlgren, Lars Andersen, Allan Buch, Gitte Skov, Toril Bækmark, Lars Ole Nejstgaard, Henrik Flagstad, Peter Hermann, Annette Carlsen, Jens Hage, Ida Noack, Louise Thrane Jensen, Mikkel Henssel, Lars Refn, Per Marquard Otzen, Morten Voigt, Clara Selina Bach, Stine Spedsbjerg, Rikke Bisgaard, Christoffer Zieler, Mia Mottelson, Jørgen Saabye, Otto Dickmeiss, Arne Sørensen, Adam O., Phillip Ytournel & Peter Klæstrup. The book also contains "The Pentel Award" written by Bob Katzenelson and Steen Iversen.

Reclaiming Technology: A poetic-scientific vocabulary aims to evoke ways of thinking about, and intervening in, technology worlds through a series of blended writing styles.Consisting of thirty-five short essays, contributors were asked to problematize some aspect of their research with technology – broadly conceived as artifact, process, craft, infrastructure, or concept – without being constrained by the more traditional repertoires of academic publishing. The result is a set of critical and experimental texts whose vocabulary speaks to the poetic, affective, and mundane modes through which technology can inspire and make anew.The ambition to reclaim stems from a collective desire to shift the grounds upon which exuberant technological claims making occurs. The book’s poetic-scientific approach is an effort at rendering technology otherwise so as to enable the emergence of alternate claims-making pathways towards more just and dignified socio-technical futures.The book should appeal to those who are curious about the technology-society nexus in more general terms. More particular audiences include anthropology and STS scholars, students (at all levels) interested in methods and writing, and practitioners looking for conceptual resources to think about technology differently.

Major Trends in Danish and Global Welfare at the Dawn of the 21st Century provides an analysis of the dramatic changes that have taken place in the Danish welfare system during the past century.Denmark still has superstar status as the world's most notable welfare society. At the same time, Danes have had to reform and adapt their welfare model, which experienced both a very exorbitant success at the beginning of the period covered and a shocking setback thereafter - a crisis the country has just recently recovered from. Amid these events, the Danes decided to reform the design of their welfare state to suit globalization and a new demographic. This was the first time that conditions far into the future were crucial to the organization of welfare today. A new orientation was created in welfare thinking; one that went from help and support to help to self-help, and to jobs and the procurement of labour with strong incentives via support policies and pensions to remain in the labour market for longer. Through these reforms, Denmark became the most digitized society in the West, but it did not solve its ever-growing integration problems, and likewise inequality grew in the otherwise so equal Danish society.

In 70,000 years, we have reshaped Earth's biology twice. First, we killed all the megafauna on the planet, and then we planted and domesticated everything, including ourselves. We upgraded ourselves from believing to knowing, dethroned God, and did put ourselves on the throne, inherited the earth, and a responsibility that we and our closest ancestors have never taken seriously. We have enough to eat and no one eats us anymore. Our only enemy is our own lack of knowledge of who and what we and our neighbors really are. We need a revolution so that we can learn that there is space and need for everyone and that there is really nothing to be afraid of. We need an educational revolution.