Air Conditioning (Object Lessons)

Hsu, Hsuan L.

ISBN 10: 1501377825 / ISBN 13: 9781501377822

Published by Bloomsbury Academic (edition ), 2024

About this Item

With dust jacket. It's a well-cared-for item that has seen limited use. The item may show minor signs of wear. All the text is legible, with all pages included. It may have slight markings and/or highlighting.

Seller Inventory # 1501377825-8-1-29

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Air Conditioning (Object Lessons)
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic (edition )
• Publication Date: 2024
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1501377825
• ISBN 13: 9781501377822
• Binding: Paperback
• Condition: Very Good
• Dust Jacket Condition: Dust Jacket Included

About this title

Synopsis

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things.

Air conditioning aspires to be unnoticed. Yet, by manipulating the air around us, it quietly conditions the baseline conditions of our physical, mental, and emotional experience. From offices and libraries to contemporary art museums and shopping malls, climate control systems shore up the fantasy of a comfortable, self-contained body that does not have to reckon with temperature. At the same time that air conditioning makes temperature a non-issue in (some) people's daily lives, thermoception-or the sensory perception of temperature-is being carefully studied and exploited as a tool of marketing, social control, and labor management.

Yet air conditioning isn't for everybody: its reliance on carbon fuels divides the world into habitable, climate-controlled bubbles and increasingly uninhabitable environments where AC is unavailable. Hsuan Hsu's Air Conditioning explores questions about culture, ethics, ecology, and social justice raised by the history and uneven distribution of climate controlling technologies.

Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.

About the Author

Hsuan L. Hsu is a Professor of English at the University of California, Davis and author of several books, including The Smell of Risk: Environmental Disparities and Olfactory Aesthetics and Geography and the Production of Space in Nineteenth-Century American Literature.