In Performing Deception, Brian Rappert reconstructs the practice of entertainment magic by analysing it through the lens of perception, deception and learning, as he goes about studying conjuring himself.Through this novel meditation on reasoning and skill, Rappert elevates magic from the undertaking of mere trickery to an art that offers the basis for rethinking our possibilities for acting in the modern world.Performing Deception covers a wide range of t...

This book examines the methods used to depict, defend and justify the use of state violence. While others have shown how 'truth is the first casualty of war', this is the first to analyse exactly how pro-war narratives are constructed and normalised.Brian Rappert details the 'upside-down' world of war in which revelation conceals, knowledge fosters uncertainty, and transparency obscures. He looks at government spin during recent wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya where officials m...

A fresh examination of the ethical and intellectual issues and dilemmas associated with attempts to establish formal humanitarian limits on weaponry.This new study considers how governments, non-governmental organizations, academics, political commentators and others have responded to the predicaments associated with imposing classifications about the relative acceptability of force and what is accomplished in their strategies for doing so. It develops these issues through combinin...

In a unique volume, Contested Futures brings together a group of scholars to examine the relationships between social action and the future. Rather than speculating upon what the future might bring, the volume interrogates the metaphors and practices through which the future is mobilized as an object of present day action and agency. The book shifts the analytical gaze from looking into the future to looking at the future as a sociological phenomenon in its own right. Futures are thus cont...

In warfare, civil unrest, and political protest, chemicals have served as means of coercion, suppression, and manipulation. This book examines how chemical agents have been justified, utilised and resisted as means of control. Through attending to how, when, and for whom bodies become rendered as sites of intervention, Chemical Bodies demonstrates the inter-relations between geopolitical transformations and the technological, spatial and social components of local events.The chapte...

This book explores the absent and missing in debates about science and security. Through varied case studies, including biological and chemical weapons control, science journalism, nanotechnology research and neuroethics, the contributors explore how matters become absent, ignored or forgotten and the implications for ethics, policy and society.The chapter 'Sensing Absence: How to See What Isn't There in the Study of Science and Security' is open access under a CC BY 4.0 license vi...

Web of Prevention provides a timely contribution to the current debate about life science research and its implications for security. It is an informative guide for both experts and the public. It is a forward-looking contribution covering both ends of the equation and creates momentum for the current discussion on effective preventive measures and effective control measures. While there are no guarantees for preventing misuse, there are nonetheless crucial steps the world communi...

From tabloid headlines to scientific discoveries to investigative documentaries, the claim that truth is being revealed is commonplace today. Such attention-grabbing claims can conjure allure, sell products, launch careers, cement authority and much more besides.And yet, despite the familiarity of revelation-talk, this notion has been subject to limited academic theorizing to date outside of matters divine. Revelations sets out to examine how the making available through r...

Chapter 1 of this book is open access under a CC BY license.This is a chapter from Absence in Science, Security and Policy edited by Brian Rappert and Brian Balmer. This chapter is available open access under a CC BY license. Part reflection on the forthcoming chapters, part analysis of academic literature, and part programmatic agenda setting, this introduction chapter forwards the importance of questioning taken for granted assumptions in sensing what is absent as a concern. It u...

In this major theoretical statement, the author offers a new and provocative interpretation of the institutional transformations associated with modernity. We do not as yet, he argues, live in a post-modern world. Rather the distinctive characteristics of our major social institutions in the closing period of the twentieth century express the emergence of a period of 'high modernity,' in which prior trends are radicalised rather than undermined. A post-modern social universe may eventually...

Student Essentials: Critical Thinking – in one hour helps you master the essentials of this core study skill in just 60 minutes. If you are studying for an undergraduate degree at university, critical thinking and analysis is imperative when studying and can often be the difference between an acceptable grade and a great grade. This book will help you develop the key essentials of this crucial skill in just one hour so you can successfully apply it to your studies straight away.

Why speed, flow, and direct expression now dominate cultural styleContemporary cultural style boosts transparency and instantaneity. These are values absorbed from our current economic conditions of "disintermediation": cutting out the middleman. Like Uber, but for art. Immediacy names this style to make sense of what we lose when the contradictions of twenty-first-century capitalism demand that aesthetics negate mediation. Surging realness as an aesthetic program ...