What does it mean to “speak for the social” in projects of technical and infrastructural change? This is the problem that the contributors to Speaking for the Social: A Catalogue of Methods set out to explore through a series of creative interventions that reimagine the role for qualitative social science in understanding and shaping design and engineering projects. The book departs from fa…
This open access book connects Jane Jacobs's celebrated urban analysis to her ideas on economics and social theory. While Jacobs is a legend in the field of urbanism and famous for challenging and profoundly influencing urban planning and design, her theoretical contributions – although central to her criticisms of and proposals for public policy – are frequently overlooked even by her most…
Debating Humanity explores sociological and philosophical efforts to delineate key features of humanity that identify us as members of the human species. After challenging the normative contradictions of contemporary posthumanism, this book goes back to the foundational debate on humanism between Jean-Paul Sartre and Martin Heidegger in the 1940s and then re-assesses the implicit and expli…
The subsequent volume revolves around the Social-Fields-Approach (SOFIA) as an approach to conceptualization and operationalisation for the purpose of empirical research. It contributes a new perspective and approach in research on innovation. We believe that SOFIA can have implications for both academic research and practical applications in reshaping the existing instruments and governance ar…