LIFE (volume)

 

LIFE: A Transdisciplinary Inquiry
Jeremy Swartz and Janet Wasko, editors

Forthcoming
December 2023 (ebook) • March 2024 (hard copy)

Intellect Ltd. • University of Chicago Press
ePDF | ePUB • Hardcover | Softcover

LIFE: A Transdisciplinary Inquiry explores life through the lenses of relationships among communication, nature, and society. The contributors, who come from the natural sciences, social sciences, and the humanities, investigate everyday life and expand upon an integrative account of media as environments and technologies. By including collaborations from internationally known scholars from the physical sciences, life sciences, cognitive sciences, and the arts, LIFE addresses issues from a transdisciplinary perspective, emphasizing how information and communication are instrumental in and for living systems.

TABLE OF CONTENTS
Preface to a Trilogy
Introduction

PART I: GENEALOGY
1. Life, Nature, and Systems, Fritjof Capra
2. What is Life?, Mark A. Bedau
3. Why Life Cannot Be Defined, Carol E. Cleland

PART II: INFORMATION AND ECOLOGIES
4. Propagating Organization: An Enquiry, Stuart Kauffman, Robert K. Logan, Robert Este, Randy Goebel, David Hobill & Ilya Shmulevich
5. Friends, Neighbours and Enemies: An Overview of the Communal and Social Biology of Plants, Roza D. Bilas, Amanda Bretman & Tom Bennett
6. The Conceptual Ecology of the Human Microbiome, Nicolae Morar & Brendan J. M. Bohannan

PART III: ENACTIONS AND VALUES
7. From Life to Mind, Mark L. Johnson
8. Metabolism and Metabolic Drift, Thomas Nail
9. From ALife to No Life: On Mediatic Contexts of Life and Death, Jussi Parikka

PART IV: ECOMEDIATIONS AND EDUCATION
10. Media and Information Literacies for a Living World: Engaging with a Cyberist Era, Divina Frau-Meigs
11. Journalistic Learning and Intentional Teaching with Technologies: STEM and Rural Communities, Ed Madison
12. Dirtying Ecocinema Studies, Salma Monani & Stephen Rust

PART V: SYNTHESES AND BIODESIGNING
13. System Dynamics, Machine Learning and Structural Validation, William Schoenberg & Jeremy Swartz
14. Life from the Edge of Synthetic Biology, Pier Luigi Luisi
15. Templating Life: DNA as Nature’s Hard Drive, Version 2.0, Mél Hogan, revised by Tessa J. Brown

PART VI: ARTFUL LIVES AND METALIVING
16. Aqueous Medium, Urban Architectures, Anadromous Being, Brook Muller
17. Satoyama and the Art of Rural Regeneration, Diane Durston
18. Metaliving, Jeremy Swartz

APPENDIX
Exhibition • Experience • Nature

Notes on Contributors
Index

REVIEWS

Tolle Lege — though rarely apropos, this stunning book meets the criteria. Destined to be a classic, it revolutionizes communication studies. The impressibility of life systems is imagined globally through sophisticated research. Instead of marginalia and augmented scholasticism, these profound essays teach us innovation and gravitas.
Clifford G. Christians, Professor Emeritus, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Undertaking an ambitious intellectual journey, this volume traverses realms of material cultures and lifeworlds, ecologies and symbolic systems, ethics and being. It delves into our deeply mediated world that is nonetheless embedded in nature and embodied in life forms large and small, while addressing some of the most meaningful and existential questions facing humanity, the planet and beyond.
Jack Linchuan Qiu, Professor and Research Director, Department of Communications and New Media, National University of Singapore

The editors ask us to zoom both in and out to see how we consider life itself, with eye-opening implications for understanding communication and its possibilities. As biofabrication and artificial intelligence become entwined with human existence, the questions are urgent, timely and fascinating.
Lana F. Rakow, Professor Emerita, University of North Dakota

Extending perspectives from media and communication research into life sciences, this second collection in the transdisciplinary series both widens and deepens the reader’s understanding of information as, at once, a material and a symbolic phenomenon.
Klaus Bruhn Jensen, Professor, Department of Media, Cognition, and Communication, University of Copenhagen

In the early 21st century, a philosophy of openness marks, embraces and encourages exploration, collaboration and synthesis across traditional boundaries. This journey encourages us to rethink our relationship with the natural world and challenges us to see life as an intricate dance of interactions, transactions and contexts.
Changfeng Chen, Executive Dean and Professor of Journalism, Tsinghua University

This is the second volume in the MEDIA • LIFE • UNIVERSE Trilogy. It follows and builds upon the 2021 collection MEDIA: A Transdisciplinary Inquiry.