Sue Thomas

Scott Rickly Christian

Silent Night

Are you always staring at your phone and never at the sky? If so, you're not alone. Many people today feel divorced from the natural world and a good number blame it on their digital lives. But what we need is more nature, not less technology. Find out how our smartphones, tablets and computers connect us to the natural world and learn 50 ways to bring your own digital life closer to nature. This book is not about giving up technology, it's about opening up your life. Join the Digital Wellbeing Facebook Group to share ideas and experiences https: //www.facebook.com/groups/digitalwellbeing/ ABOUT THE AUTHOR Sue Thomas has an international reputation for her accessible and wide-ranging writing on technology, nature and culture. PRAISE FOR 'TECHNOBIOPHILIA: NATURE AND CYBERSPACE' 'I'll admit it: I love tech with natural elements like wood, and I don't think I'm alone.' (Mike Elgan, Confessions of a Technobiophiliac, Computerworld) 'The book is about a powerful subliminal urge by our entire species to hang onto our connection to the natural world, as we are pulled deeper into the digital age.' (George Davis, Psychology Today) 'A challenge to the sanctity of some mythical idea of our authentic experience of nature. (Richard Coyne, Edinburgh College of Art) 'A very personal and broadly interdisciplinary look at one of the most important issues of our time - the tension between the natural and digital worlds. This book provides a useful lens for seeing where we are, who we are, and where humans, our digital creations, and the natural world are heading. We need to learn to make fulfilling lives without abandoning either the world of technology or the world of biology. Technobiophilia shows the way.' ( Howard Rheingold, writer and critic.) 'Technobiophilia reminds readers that we control how we use our technology-and even smartphones and screensavers can help us connect to the natural world.' (Emily Glaser, Orion Magazine)

How to Feel Better Without Logging Off

Nature and Wellbeing in the Digital Age

An anthology of 47 stories, all written by women and depicting the wild woman archetype of Women Who Run With the Wolves, by Clarissa Pinkola Estes, who provides an introduction to the book. The contributors include Angela Carter, Anne Rice, Alice Walker and Fay Weldon.

Contemporary Short Stories by Women Celebrating Women

Wild Women

Addressing Jean Rhys's composition and positioning of her fiction, this book invites and challenges us to read the tacit, silent and explicit textual bearings she offers and reveals new insights about the formation, scope and complexity of Rhys's experimental aesthetics. Tracing the distinctive and shifting evolution of Rhys's experimental aesthetics over her career, Sue Thomas explores Rhys's practices of composition in her fiction and drafts, as well as her self-reflective comment on her writing. The author examines patterns of interrelation, intertextuality, intermediality and allusion, both diachronic and synchronic, as well as the cultural histories entwined within them. Through close analysis of these, this book reveals new experimental, thematic, generic and political reaches of Rhys's fiction and sharpens our insight into her complex writerly affiliations and lineages.

Jean Rhys's Modernist Bearings and Experimental Aesthetics

Cyborg imaginings mix with romance and transformation in this complex first novel where even the reader has a role to play. The narrator works as a compositor, a new kind of storyteller, but she is designing a different future for herself. Once a wife and mother, now she longs to escape from the world of human emotion into the calm and pain-free life of a cyborg. As her surgeries move towards closure, her story characters Shirley and Rosa have other agendas, leading to an unexpected outcome.

Correspondence

Fashion Ethics provides a comprehensive overview of the ethical issues in the fashion industry, from collection design concept to upcycling and closed loop production. This book answers an urgent need for a comprehensive understanding of the fundamental ethics of the fashion industry. Sue Thomas goes beyond the usual contentious issues of environmental impact and human rights, taking the reader deeper into the endemic issues including sizeism, ageism, animal rights, and the lack of diversity in models and in the media. The book lays out the significant ethical issues within the fashion supply chain by mapping the lifecycle of a garment and exploring key topics such as deep ecology, cultural copyright speciesism, the role of the customer, and technology in future ethics. It also features current international industry information and industry-relevant case studies from brands, media and mobile technology, and NGOs including Oxfam (UK), Redress (Hong Kong), Nimany (US), Labor Link (US), People Tree (UK), and Peppermint (Australia). Fashion Ethics provides much-needed information for fashion students, industry professionals, and customers.

Fashion Ethics

Why are there so many nature metaphors - clouds, rivers, streams, viruses, and bugs - in the language of the internet? Why do we adorn our screens with exotic images of forests, waterfalls, animals and beaches? In Technobiophilia: Nature and Cyberspace, Sue Thomas interrogates the prevalence online of nature-derived metaphors and imagery and comes to a surprising conclusion. The root of this trend, she believes, lies in biophilia, defined by biologist E.O. Wilson as 'the innate attraction to life and lifelike processes'. In this wide-ranging transdisciplinary study she explores the strong thread of biophilia which runs through our online lives, a phenomenon she calls 'technobiophilia', or, the 'innate attraction to life and lifelike processes as they appear in technology'. The restorative qualities of biophilia can alleviate mental fatigue and enhance our capacity for directed attention, soothing our connected minds and easing our relationship with computers. Technobiophilia: Nature and Cyberspace offers new insights on what is commonly known as 'work-life balance'. It explores ways to make our peace with technology-induced anxiety and achieve a 'tech-nature balance' through practical experiments designed to enhance our digital lives indoors, outdoors, and online. The book draws on a long history of literature on nature and technology and breaks new ground as the first to link the two. Its accessible style will attract the general reader, whilst the clear definition of key terms and concepts throughout should appeal to undergraduates and postgraduates of new media and communication studies, internet studies, environmental psychology, and human-computer interaction. www.technobiophilia.com

Nature and Cyberspace

Technobiophilia

Returning the Gaze

Situates Rhys's authorial and narrative voices politically and ethically in relation to the historical worlds of her fiction and autobiographical writing.

The Worlding of Jean Rhys

Clyde Wilcox

This edition of Women and Elective Office offers the latest research on women as candidates and officeholders. It provides a comprehensive look at at the history and status of women in elective office, their prospects for the future, and why women in elected office matter to American democracy. It features all-new essays and up-to-the-minute research by leading experts in the field, including the latest political trends and events such as Hillary Rodham Clinton's run for the presidency, women's representation on the state and local level, the diversity of women officeholders' experiences and circumstances, and female judges. Women and Elective Office is an essential guide to understanding the past, present, and future of women in all echelons of government.

Past, Present, and Future

Women and Elective Office

The story of a woman raising a daughter without a father. As the daughter sulks and rages at both parents--the father abandoned them--the mother fights loneliness and despair by inventing for herself a phantom lover. By the author of Correspondence.

Water

Anne Collett

Russell McDougall

This book tracks across history and cultures the ways in which writers have imagined cyclones, hurricanes, and typhoons, collectively understood as “tropical weather.” Historically, literature has drawn upon the natural world for its store of symbolic language and technical device, making use of violent storms in the form of plot, drama, trope, and image in order to highlight their relationship to the political, social, and psychological realms of human affairs. Charting this relationship through writers such as Joseph Conrad, Herman Melville, Gisèle Pineau, and other writers from places like Australia, Japan, Mauritius, the Caribbean, and the Philippines, this ground-breaking collection of essays illuminates the specificities of the ways local, national, and regional communities have made sense and even relied upon the literary to endure the devastation caused by deadly tropical weather.

Typhoons, Hurricanes, and Cyclones

Tracking the Literature of Tropical Weather

'Hello World' is the story of a life online. Part travelogue, part memoir, Sue Thomas draws on her online travels as well as her physical journeys in the USA, Australia, Spain and England. While the book is non-fiction, it is a direct descendent of 'Correspondence', Thomas’ extraordinary novel that also deals with the synergies between digital and physical worlds. Like its fictional counterpart, Hello World will trigger feelings in readers of recognition and will stimulate debate on the nature of the physical in a wired world for years to come. First published in 2004. 'This is a book about a love affair. It's also a meditation on a phenomenon that has changed not just our lives but our perceptions of ourselves.' The Independent. '...an essential tour guide to the poetics of time, space and gender in the Information Age. This book is quite simply a Baedeker to the cyber-realm.' Carolyn Guertin. '...engagingly and warmly written, 'Hello World' combines first-person meditations with a wealth of information. Highly recommended for first-time users and those who want to try dipping their toes into the cyberwaters.' N. Katherine Hayles. '...embracing digital media for its freedom and life beyond the physical page, her writings fuse the surfaces, textures, histories and interactions of our bodies and minds.' Robin Rimbaud / Scanner. 'Sue Thomas is one of the most innovation thinkers, promoters and facilitators on the web.' Stelarc. '...anyone who feels both seduced and appalled by the complexities of embedded technology will empathise with this account of the personal highs and lows of an intimate relationship with technology.' Jenny Wolmark. 'Speaking with ease and authority, earned through years of immersive investigation, Sue Thomas critiques virtuality in a manner which makes this book accessible to those who are new to the networked world, as well as a must-read for those already there.' Melinda Rackham. 'Hello World is fascinating, almost hypnotic. Thomas travels all over the physical world, and all over the virtual world, visiting sights and sites of intrinsic and historical interest. She describes what she sees, tells us how the experience affects her, and recounts how past travelers have marked these conceptual landscapes. Thomas invokes Thoreau throughout the book, and the comparison is apt: As Thoreau's observations of the activity around Walden Pond always told us as much about him as they did about the nature he studied, so, too, Thomas's observations reveal much about herself. The intensity of her love for cyberspace is manifest in her attentiveness to the detail of each virtual experience.' Tekka. 'Thomas offers a way of being in the world that refuses hierarchies and primacies and offers us a model of an engaged and creative practice that is both virtual and real.' RealTime. 'As a mix it's intense and entrancing, and it demonstrates the ease with which computers, electronic communications, and lives all intertwine beyond the home.' Alan Sondheim. Originally published in paperback by Raw Nerve Books. Web Supplement http://travelsinvirtuality.typepad.com/helloworld/

Travels in Virtuality

Hello World

Stephen Hay

Jill Ryan

Stephen Billett

Cheryl Sim

Greer Johnson

Leaving school, whether to move on to training, work or education, is a fundamental rite of passage the world over. This volume draws on a wealth of international sources and studies in its analysis of the ‘transitions’ young students make as they move on from their secondary schooling. It identifies how these transitions are planned for by policymakers, enacted by school staff and engaged with by students themselves. With data from a range of nations with advanced industrial economies, the book delineates how the policies relating to these transitions need to be conceived and implemented, how the transitions themselves are negotiated by young people, and how they might be shaped to meet the varied needs of the students they are designed to help. The authors argue that the relationship, often complex, between what schools provide in the way of preparation, and the ways in which students take up what is on offer, is the crucial nexus for understanding the experience of transitions by young people, and for enhancing that experience. With a host of case studies of transition policies themselves, as well as evaluative data on how they were received by the school leavers whom they were designed for, this valuable addition to the educational literature deserves to be read by all those with roles in preparing the young for their journey into a complex adult world full of pitfalls as well as opportunity.

Sue Thomas

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