3D-printed Futures of Manufacturing, Social Change and Technological Innovation in China and Singapore: The Ghost of a Massless Future?

2019 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
pp. 254-270 ◽  
Author(s):  
Luke Heemsbergen ◽  
Angela Daly ◽  
Jiajie Lu ◽  
Thomas Birtchnell

This article outlines preliminary findings from a futures forecasting exercise where participants in Shenzhen and Singapore considered the socio-technological construction of 3D printing in terms of work and social change. We offered participants ideal political-economic futures across local–global knowledge and capital–commons dimensions, and then had them backcast the contextual waypoints across markets, culture, policy, law and technology dimensions that help guide towards each future. Their discussion identified various contextually sensitive points, but also tended to dismiss the farthest reaches of each proposed ideal, often reverting to familiar contextual signifiers. Here, we offer discussion on how participants saw culture and industry shaping futures for pertinent political economic concerns in the twenty-first century.

Author(s):  
Cristina I. Tica

Frontiers and borders are likely to remain significant on the world stage in the twenty-first century in political, economic, and sociocultural contexts. Frontiers are dynamic areas where identities are created, contested, maintained, negotiated, or manipulated. Different aspects of frontiers and borders are illustrated in this volume, and by taking the border and the frontier as a point of departure, this collection of studies seeks to shift the analytical focus from center to someplace else, from locus of power to places of contested power, and from places with presumed stability to places of presumed disorder, tension, and instability. There is much work in this area for bioarchaeologists, and with this volume we hope to concurrently open more venues to frontiers and borders studies and to raise many more questions.


Author(s):  
Geeta S. Mehta

Humanism as a theistic, pragmatic theory was first conceived around 2000 BCE in India. It is a this-worldly, human-centered, secular philosophical outlook. Gandhi understands religion as connoting the individual’s integrity and society’s solidarity. Free-will for him is freedom of the "rational self." Morality is not a matter of outward conformity, but of inward fulfillment. His integral humanism is indicated by his enumerated seven social sins: (1) politics without principles; (2) wealth without work; (3) commerce without morality; (4) knowledge without character; (5) pleasure without conscience; (6) science without morality; and (7) worship without sacrifice. The eleven vows recited in his Ášrama prayer began with Truth and Non-Violence as foundational for the integration of moral, social, political and economic values. Non-Violence should be a creed rather than a policy. Gandhi’s Truth meant freedom of self-actualization for societal development. He fulfilled these two principal themes of humanism in the civic function of religion and religious tolerance which aimed at evolving moral individuals in moral societies. "The twenty-first century should bring a synthesis of science and spirituality, socialism with human rights, social-change with nonviolence. And this is Gandhi."


2012 ◽  
Vol 26 (1) ◽  
pp. 33-42 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Rodin

We are one humanity, but seven billion humans. This is the essential challenge of global ethics: how to accommodate the tension between our universal and particular natures. This tension is, of course, age-old and runs through all moral and political philosophy. But in the world of the early twenty-first century it plays out in distinctive new ways. Ethics has always engaged twin capacities inherent in every human: the capacity to harm and the capacity to help. But the profound set of transformations commonly referred to as globalization—the increasing mobility of goods, labor, and capital; the increasing interconnectedness of political, economic, and financial systems; and the radical empowerment of groups and individuals through technology—have enabled us to harm and to help others in ways that our forebears could not have imagined. What we require from a global ethic is shaped by these transformative forces; and global ethics—the success or failure of that project—will substantially shape the course of the twenty-first century.


2014 ◽  
Vol 113 (761) ◽  
pp. 123-124
Author(s):  
Daniel S. Hamilton

The United States and Europe must rebalance their partnership in order to face the political, economic, and security challenges of the twenty-first century.


2015 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 13-34
Author(s):  
Andreia-Irina Suciu ◽  
Mihaela Culea

In the contemporary world of extremely dynamic movements in the fields of territorial state reconfiguration, economic “colonization”, globalization, Europeanization, migration of population, borrowing of cultural values and intensified cultural exchange or transfer, defining national identity has become a process which registers numerous changes and encounters various challenges. The classical features that assisted this process of defining national identity in the past – a historic territory, common myths, historical memories and values, a common public culture, common legal rights and duties, a common economy with territorial mobility (A. D. Smith 1991: 14) – undergo significant transformations each decade and the definition of a nation’s identity calls for important reconsiderations. One aspect worth considering is that of losing or self-censoring one’s national identity due to a nation’s own intention or some external demands of adaptation to general aspects of political, economic, financial, social, or cultural nature. Our paper intends to explore some of the causes or factors that might lead to twenty-first century Romania’s weakening, degradation or loss of national identity and suggest some possible solutions against such a process.


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