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New Titles at the UConn Library Avery Point

New Titles October 2024

Spotlight

Below is a short selection of new eBooks from other UConn Library collections that support the information/research needs of UConn Avery Point.

You can find other eBooks by navigating to the UConn Library search page, clicking the drop down menu that reads "Articles and Library Catalog" (next to the microphone and magnifying glass icon), and then selecting "E-Books". When you search your preferred topic, each result will be an eBook.

Spotlight Gallery - October 2024

Empire of Commerce: The Closing of the Mississippi and the Opening of Atlantic Trade

A groundbreaking study situating the Mississippi River valley at the heart of the early American republic's political economy

Shortly after the ratification of the US Constitution in 1789, twenty-two-year-old Andrew Jackson pledged his allegiance to the king of Spain. Prior to the Louisiana Purchase, imperial control of the North American continent remained an open question. Spain controlled the Mississippi River, closing it to American trade in 1784, and western men on the make like Jackson had to navigate the overlapping economic and political forces at work with ruthless pragmatism.

In Empire of Commerce, Susan Gaunt Stearns takes readers back to a time when there was nothing inevitable about the United States' untrammeled westward expansion. Her work demonstrates the centrality of trade on and along the Mississippi River to the complex development of the political and economic structures that shaped the nascent American republic. Stearns's perspective-shifting book reconfigures our understanding of key postrevolutionary moments-the writing of the Constitution, the outbreak of the Whiskey Rebellion, and the Louisiana Purchase-and demonstrates how the transatlantic cotton trade finally set the stage for transforming an imagined west into something real.

Workers of the Earth: Labour, Ecology and Reproduction in the Age of Climate Change

Capitalism is destroying our planet, but like most social progress in the last two centuries, ecological justice can only be achieved through working-class struggle.

In Workers of the Earth, Stefania Barca uncovers the environmental history and political ecology of labour to shed new light on the potentiality of workers as ecological subjects. Taking an ecofeminist approach, this ground-breaking book makes a unique contribution to the emerging field of environmental labour studies, expanding the category of labour to include waged and unwaged, industrial and meta-industrial workers.

Going beyond conventional categories of 'production' and 'reproduction' as separate spheres of human experience, Barca offers a fresh perspective on the place of labour in today's global climate struggle, reminding us that the fight against climate change is a fight against capitalism.

Deepwater Alchemy: Extractive Mediation and the Taming of the Seafloor

How underwater mediation has transformed deep-sea spaces into resource-rich frontiers.
 

Green energy technologies such as windmills, solar panels, and electric vehicles may soon depend on material found at the seabed. How did a space once imagined to be empty and unfathomable come to be thought of as a treasure trove of resources? Lisa Yin Han traces how contemporary developments in underwater sensing and imaging materially and imaginatively transmogrify the ocean bottom into a resource frontier capable of sustaining a digitally connected global future.

Set against the backdrop of climate change, energy transition, and the expansion of industrial offshore extractions, Deepwater Alchemy looks at oceanic media and its representation of the seabed in terms of valuable resources. From high-tech simulations to laboratories and archives that collect and analyze sediments, Han explores the media technologies that survey, visualize, and condition the possibility for industrial resource extraction, introducing the concept of extractive mediation to describe the conflations between resource prospecting and undersea knowledge production. Moving away from anthropocentric frameworks, she argues that we must equalize access to deep ocean mediation and include the submerged perspectives of multispecies communities.

From the proliferation of petroleum seismology to environmental-impact research on seabed mining to the development of internet-enabled seafloor observatories, Deepwater Alchemy shows us that deepwater mediation is entangled in existential hopes and fears for our planetary future. As the ocean bottom becomes increasingly accessible to people, Han prompts us to ask not whether we can tame the seafloor, but, rather, why and for whom are we taming it?