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This book identifies a series of “social innovation moments” in American history. Through these moments—during which social movements have embraced advances in communications technologies—the book illuminates the complicated, dangerous, innovative, and exciting relationship between these technologies, social movements, and social change. It shows that, almost without fail, developments in how we communicate shape social movements, just as those movements change the very technologies themselves. From the printing press to the television, social movements have leveraged communications technologies to advance change. In this moment of rapidly evolving communications, it is imperative to assess the role that the Internet, mobile devices, and social media can play in promoting social justice. But first we must look to the past, to examples of movements throughout American history that successfully harnessed communications technology, thus facilitating positive social change. Such movements embraced new communications technologies to help organize their communities; to form grassroots networks in order to facilitate face-to-face interactions; and to promote positive, inclusive messaging that stressed their participants' shared dignity and humanity. Using the past as prologue, the book provides effective lessons in the use of communications technology so that we can have the best communicative tools at our disposal—both now and in the future.

This book examines the practical techniques humanitarians have used to manage and measure starvation, from Victorian “scientific” soup kitchens to space-age, high-protein foods. Tracing the evolution of these techniques since the start of the nineteenth century, the book argues that humanitarianism is not a simple story of progress and improvement, but rather is profoundly shaped by sociopolitical conditions. Aid is often presented as an apolitical and technical project, but the way humanitarians conceive and tackle human needs has always been deeply influenced by culture, politics, and society. These influences extend down to the most detailed mechanisms for measuring malnutrition and providing sustenance. As the book shows, over the past century, the humanitarian approach to hunger has redefined food as nutrients and hunger as a medical condition. Aid has become more individualized, medicalized, and rationalized, shaped by modernism in bureaucracy, commerce, and food technology. The book focuses on the gains and losses that result, examining the complex compromises that arise between efficiency of distribution and quality of care. It concludes that humanitarian groups have developed an approach to the empty stomach that is dependent on compact, commercially produced devices and is often paternalistic and culturally insensitive.

This book is an ethnographic examination of video game production. The developers that were researched for almost three years in a medium-sized studio in the United States loved making video games that millions play. Only some, however, can enjoy this dream job, which can be precarious and alienating for many others. That is, the passion of a predominantly white-male labor force relies on material inequalities involving the sacrificial labor of their families, unacknowledged work of precarious testers, and thousands of racialized and gendered workers in the Global South. The book explores the politics of doing what one loves. In the context of work, passion and love imply freedom, participation, and choice, but in fact they accelerate self-exploitation and can impose emotional toxicity on other workers by forcing them to work endless hours. The book argues that such ludic discourses in the game industry disguise the racialized and gendered inequalities on which a profitable transnational industry thrives. Within capitalism, work is not just an economic matter, and the political nature of employment and love can still be undemocratic even when based on mutual consent. As the book demonstrates, rather than considering work simply as a matter of economics based on trade-offs in the workplace, we should consider the question of work and love as one of democracy rooted in politics.