Sustainable Design: A Critical Guide (Architecture Briefs)

Sustainable Design: A Critical Guide (Architecture Briefs) by David Bergman
English | 2012 | ISBN: 1568989415 | 144 pages | EPUB | 98,7 MB

Written for students and practitioners in the fields of architecture and interior design, our new Architecture Brief Sustainable Design provides a concise overview of all the techniques available for reducing the energy footprint of structures and spaces. With clear, simple language and a practical “can do” approach, author David Bergman covers everything from the profession’s ethical responsibility, to design structures and spaces that sustain our natural resources, to specific considerations such as rainwater harvesting, graywater recycling, passive heating techniques, solar orientation, green roofs, wind energy, daylighting, indoor air quality, material evaluation and specification, and how to work with green building certification programs.

Critical Discursive Psychology (2nd edition) (Repost)

Critical Discursive Psychology (2nd edition) By Ian Parker
2015 | 320 Pages | ISBN: 1137485590 | PDF | 2 MB

This book introduces key issues and historical contexts in critical discursive research in psychology. It sets out methodological steps for critical readings of texts, arguments that can be made for qualitative research in academic settings, and arguments that could be made against it by critical psychologists.

Henry Giroux - Pedagogy and the Politics of Hope: Theory, Culture, and Schooling, A Critical Reader

Henry Giroux – Pedagogy and the Politics of Hope: Theory, Culture, and Schooling, A Critical Reader
1997 | ISBN: 0813332745 | English | 304 pages | PDF | 30 MB

Henry A. Giroux is one of the most respected and well-known critical education scholars, social critics, and astute observers of popular culture in the modern world. For those who follow his considerably influential work in critical pedagogy and social criticism, this first-ever collection of his classic writings, augmented by a new essay, is a must-have volume that reveals his evolution as a scholar. In it, he takes on three major considerations central to pedagogy and schooling.The first section offers Giroux’s most widely read theoretical critiques on the culture of positivism and technocratic rationality. He contends that by emphasizing the logic of science and rationality rather than taking a holistic worldview, these approaches fail to take account of connections among social, political, and historical forces or to consider the importance of such connections for the process of schooling.In the second section, Giroux expands the theoretical framework for conceptualizing and implementing his version of critical pedagogy. His theory of border pedagogy advocates a democratic public philosophy that embraces the notion of difference as part of a common struggle to extend the quality of public life. For Giroux, a student must function as a border-crosser, as a person moving in and out of physical, cultural, and social borders. He uses the popular medium of Hollywood film to show students how they might understand their own position as partly constructed within a dominant Eurocentric tradition and how power and authority relate to the wider society as well as to the classroom.In the last section, Giroux explores a number of contemporary traditions and issues, including modernism, postmodernism, and feminism, and discusses the matter of cultural difference in the classroom. Finally, in an essay written especially for this volume, Giroux analyzes the assault on education and teachers as public intellectuals that began in the Reagan-Bush era and continues today.

Critical Republicanism: The Hijab Controversy and Political Philosophy

Cecile Laborde, “Critical Republicanism: The Hijab Controversy and Political Philosophy”
2008 | ISBN-10: 0199550212 | 396 pages | PDF | 2 MB

The first comprehensive analysis of the philosophical issues raised by the hijab controversy in France, this book also conducts a dialogue between contemporary Anglo-American and French political theory and defends a progressive republican solution to so-called multicultural conflicts in contemporary societies. It critically assesses the official republican philosophy of laïcité which purported to justify the 2004 ban on religious signs in schools. Laïcité is shown to encompass a comprehensive theory of republican citizenship, centered on three ideals: equality (secular neutrality of the public sphere), liberty (individual autonomy and emancipation) and fraternity (civic loyalty to the community of citizens). Challenging official interpretations of laïcité, the book then puts forward a critical republicanism which does not support the hijab ban, yet upholds a revised interpretation of three central republican commitments: secularism, non-domination and civic solidarity. Thus, it articulates a version of secularism which squarely addresses the problem of status quo bias – the fact that Western societies are historically not neutral towards all religions. It also defends a vision of female emancipation which rejects the coercive paternalism inherent in the regulation of religious dress, yet does not leave individuals unaided in the face of religious and secular, patriarchal and ethnocentric domination. Finally, the book outlines a theory of immigrant integration which places the burden of civic integration on basic socio-political institutions, rather than on citizens themselves. Critical republicanism proposes an entirely new approach to the management of religious and cultural pluralism, centred on the pursuit of the progressive ideal of non-domination in existing, non-ideal societies.

English: Critical Reading & Writing Skills (repost)

Salvador Dalí (Critical Lives)

Mary Ann Caws, “Salvador Dalí (Critical Lives)”

ISBN: 1861893833 | 2009 | EPUB | 192 pages | 2 MB

“Each morning when I awake, I experience again a supreme pleasure—that of being Salvador Dalí.”

He was a force unto himself, an icon of outrageousness, artistic brilliance, eccentricity, and unmistakable style. Salvador Domingo Felipe Jacinto Dalí y Domènech, Marquis of Pubol, was one of the foremost artists of the twentieth century, and in this concise narrative acclaimed art historian Mary Ann Caws provides a sharply written survey of his life and work.

Salvador Dalí examines every twist and turn in Dalí’s long and multifaceted career and the pivotal artistic movements at whose center he stood. From his early life in the Catalan region and his expulsions from the School of Fine Arts in Madrid and other schools to the surrealist movement and his work with Buñuel on the films Un chein andalou and L’Âge d’or, Caws charts Dalí’s influences and creative process. Dalí’s turbulent personal life brought him in contact with a rich assortment of intellectual figures, and Caws considers his relationships with his family; his lovers, including the married Elena Diakonova; and with friends such as poet Federico Garcia Lorca. His writings, drawings, photography, and painted works offer up new clues about the artist under Caws’s incisive eye, as she analyzes his lesser-known writings and creative works, as well as his Surrealist paintings and “hand-painted dream photographs” such as The Persistence of Memory.

A masterfully written biographical study, Salvador Dalí paints an arresting portrait of one of the most elusive artists of our time.