New Books In Critical Theory

What are the tactics needed for a world of platforms and algorithms? In Algorithms of Resistance: The Everyday Fight against Platform Power (MIT Press, 2024), Tiziano Bonini, Associate Professor in Sociology of Culture and Communication at the University of Siena, and Emiliano Treré, a Reader in Data Agency and Media Ecologies at Cardiff University, examine the impact of platforms and algorithms on people, communities, and global social life. The book explores these issues using three case studies of gig work, culture, and politics. At its heart, the book demonstrates the potential for transforming the seeming total control of platforms and algorithms through the tactics and strategies of workers, artists, and social movements. The book is essential reading across humanities, social sciences, and computing, as well as for anyone interested in contemporary digital life. The book is available open access here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium

While American television has long relied on a strategic foregrounding of feminist politics to promote certain programming's cultural value, Woman Up: Invoking Feminism in Quality Television (Wayne State University Press, 2022) by Dr. Julia Havas is the first sustained critical analysis of the twenty-first-century resurgence of this tradition. In Woman Up, Dr. Havas’ central argument is that postmillennial "feminist quality television" springs from a rhetorical subversion of the (much-debated) masculine-coded "quality television" culture on the one hand and the dominance of postfeminist popular culture on the other. Postmillennial quality television culture promotes the idea of aesthetic-generic hierarchies among different types of scripted programming. Its development has facilitated evaluative academic analyses of television texts based on aesthetic merit, producing a corpus of scholarship devoted to pinpointing where value resides in shows considered worthy of discussion. Other strands of television schola

In Terracene: A Crude Aesthetics (Duke UP, 2023), Salar Mameni historicizes the popularization of the scientific notion of the Anthropocene alongside the emergence of the global war on terror. Mameni theorizes the Terracene as an epoch marked by a convergence of racialized militarism and environmental destruction. Both the Anthropocene and the war on terror centered the antagonist figures of the Anthropos and the terrorist as responsible for epochal changes in the new geological and geopolitical world orders. In response, Mameni shows how the Terracene requires radically new engagements with terra (the earth), whose intelligence resides in matters such as oil and phenomena like earthquakes and fires. Drawing on the work of artists whose practices interrogate histories of settler-colonial and imperial interests in land and resources in Iran, Iraq, Yemen, Kuwait, Syria, Palestine, and other regions most affected by the war on terror, Mameni offers speculative paths into the aesthetics of the Terracene. Salar Ma

In many countries, property law grants equal rights to men and women. Why, then, do women still accumulate less wealth than men? Combining quantitative, ethnographic, and archival research, The Gender of Capital: How Families Perpetuate Wealth Inequality (Harvard UP, 2023) explains how and why, in every class of society, women are economically disadvantaged with respect to their husbands, fathers, and brothers. The reasons lie with the unfair economic arrangements that play out in divorce proceedings, estate planning, and other crucial situations where law and family life intersect. Céline Bessière and Sibylle Gollac argue that, whatever the law intends, too many outcomes are imprinted with unthought sexism. In private decisions, old habits die hard: families continue to allocate resources disproportionately to benefit boys and men. Meanwhile, the legal profession remains in thrall to assumptions that reinforce gender inequality. Bessière and Gollac marshal a range of economic data documenting these biases. T

What would Nietzsche say… about today’s divisive issues and debates? I spoke with Glenn Wallis, author of the new book, Nietzsche Now!, on how the Great Immoralist guides us in understanding democracy, identity, civilization, consciousness, religion, and other urgent topics of our time. Wallis identifies six guiding principles in Nietzsche’s work that help navigate today’s concerns: curiosity, humor, courage, distance, solitude, and humor. Steeped in Nietzsche but never academic, dogmatic, or pious (which Nietzsche would have hated!), Wallis explains with infectious enthusiasm and meticulous care the reasons why Nietzsche may be the most relevant thinker for our time. Glenn Wallis is the editor and translator of The Dhammapada and Basic Teachings of the Buddha (Random House), and the author of A Critique of Western Buddhism (Bloomsbury), An Anarchist’s Manifesto, and How to Fix Education (both with Warbler Press). He holds a Ph.D. from Harvard University and has taught at several universities, including Brown

According to Dr. Justin O’Connor, culture is at the heart of what it means to be human. But twenty-five years ago, the British government rebranded art and culture as 'creative industries', valued for their economic contribution, and set out to launch the UK as the creative workshop of a globalised world. Where does that leave art and culture now? Facing exhausted workers and a lack of funding and vision, culture finds itself in the grip of accountancy firms, creativity gurus and Ted Talkers. At a time of sweeping geo-political turmoil, culture has been de-politicised, its radical energies reduced to factors of industrial production. Culture is Not an Industry: Reclaiming Art and Culture for the Common (Manchester UP, 2024) is about what happens when an essential part of our democratic citizenship, fundamental to our human rights, is reduced to an industry. Culture is not an industry argues that art and culture need to renew their social contract and re-align with the radical agenda for a more equitable futur

Labor and race have shared a complex, interconnected history in America. For decades, key aspects of work—from getting a job to workplace norms to advancement and mobility—ignored and failed Black people. While explicit discrimination no longer occurs, and organizations make internal and public pledges to honor and achieve “diversity,” inequities persist through what Dr. Adia Harvey Wingfield calls the “gray areas:” the relationships, networks, and cultural dynamics integral to companies that are now more important than ever. The reality is that Black employees are less likely to be hired, stall out at middle levels, and rarely progress to senior leadership positions. Dr. Wingfield has spent a decade examining inequality in the workplace, interviewing over two hundred Black subjects across professions about their work lives. In Gray Areas: How the Way We Work Perpetuates Racism and What We Can Do to Fix It (Amistad Press, 2023), she introduces seven of them: Alex, a worker in the gig economy Max, an emergency

In Nature's Wild: Love, Sex, and Law in the Caribbean (Duke UP, 2021), Andil Gosine engages with questions of humanism, queer theory, and animality to examine and revise understandings of queer desire in the Caribbean. Surveying colonial law, visual art practices, and contemporary activism, Gosine shows how the very concept of homosexuality in the Caribbean (and in the Americas more broadly) has been overdetermined by a colonially influenced human/animal divide. Gosine refutes this presupposed binary and embraces animality through a series of case studies: a homoerotic game called puhngah, the institution of gender-based dress codes in Guyana, and efforts toward the decriminalization of sodomy in Trinidad and Tobago—including the work of famed activist Colin Robinson, paintings of human animality by Guadeloupean artist Kelly Sinnapah Mary, and Gosine's own artistic practice. In so doing, he troubles the ways in which individual and collective anxieties about “wild natures” have shaped the existence of Caribbe

Barbie and the Great American Identity Crisis (Pi Press, 2024) is not merely a book but a call to action-a rallying cry for societal introspection and transformation. With meticulous research and unflinching honesty, Dr. Karyne E. Messina offers a roadmap for reclaiming our integrity and forging a more just and equitable future. Engaging, insightful, and indispensable, this book is essential reading for anyone invested in the fate of our nation and the preservation of our collective identity.  In Barbie and the Great American Identity Crisis, Dr. Messina ingeniously uses Barbie to symbolize the multifaceted identity crisis gripping America. Barbie's transformation from Lilli reflects the complexities of stolen identity and cultural appropriation, mirroring the broader societal struggle with individual and national identity.Just as Mattel co-opted Barbie's identity from a German toymaker, America grapples with a loss of authenticity and integrity in its own narrative. Dr. Messina's exploration of Barbie's evol

Ariella Aisha Azoulay argues that the institutions that make our world, from archives and museums to ideas of sovereignty and human rights to history itself, are all dependent on imperial modes of thinking. Imperialism has segmented populations into differentially governed groups, continually emphasized the possibility of progress while trying to destroy what came before, and voraciously sought out the new by sealing the past away in dusty archival boxes and the glass vitrines of museums. By practicing what she calls potential history, Azoulay argues that we can still refuse the imperial violence that shattered communities, lives, and worlds, from native peoples in the Americas to the Congo ruled by Belgium s brutal King Léopold II, from dispossessed Palestinians in 1948 to displaced refugees in our own day. In Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism (Verso, 2019), Azoulay travels alongside historical companions - an old Palestinian man who refused to leave his village in 1948, an anonymous woman in war-rav

How are digital platforms transforming heritage? In Geopolitics of Digital Heritage (Cambridge UP, 2023), Dr Natalia Grincheva, Program Leader of the BA (Hons) Arts Management at the University of the Arts Singapore and Honorary Senior Research Fellow at the University of Melbourne, and Dr Elizabeth Stainforth, a lecturer in the School of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies at the University of Leeds explore the global political context for digital heritage. Drawing on 4 detailed case studies- Singapore Memory Project, the National Library of Australia’s Trove, the EU’s Europeana, and Google Arts and Culture- the book shows the political ideas and imperatives underpinning the aggregation of heritage on digital platforms. Both an accessible introduction and a significant intervention to the field of heritage studies, the book will be essential reading across the arts, humanities and social sciences. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium

What is the future of higher education? In The Liberal Arts Paradox in Higher Education: Negotiating Inclusion and Prestige (Policy Press, 2023), Dr Kathryn Telling, a lecturer in education at the University of Manchester, explores the rise of liberal arts degrees in England to examine the broader contours of the contemporary university. The book tells the story of student and staff perspectives on liberal arts, as well as examining the institutional motivations and narratives underpinning the dilemmas and paradoxes of this subject area. Offering a rich and detailed engagement with key issues such as interdisciplinarity, institutional status, employability, and inequality in higher education, the book is essential reading across the humanities and social sciences. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

Journalists have a long history of covering race and racism in the United States, telling stories that shed light on protest, activism, institutional turmoil, and policy change. Especially in recent years, though, the racial politics of journalism has very often become the story itself. Newsrooms across the country have had to grapple with big questions about diversity, inclusion, power, and professional standards in the media industry. What have these debates looked like up close? In what ways have newsrooms evolved? And what does this all mean for the stories we tell about our communities, our country, and the world at large?  In Antiracist Journalism: The Challenge of Creating Equitable Local News (Columbia UP, 2023), Andrea Wenzel provides a critical look at how local media organizations in the Philadelphia area are attempting to address structural racism. She focuses on two established, majority-white newsrooms, the Philadelphia Inquirer and the public radio station WHYY, and two start-ups where at least

How do bureaucratic documents create and reproduce a state’s capacity to see? What kinds of worlds do documents help create? Further, how might such documentary practices and settler colonial ways of seeing be refused? Settler Colonial Ways of Seeing: Documentation, Administration, and the Interventions of Indigenous Art (Fordham University Press, 2023) by Dr. Danielle Taschereau Mamers investigates how the Canadian state has used documents, lists, and databases to generate, make visible—and invisible—Indigenous identity. With an archive of legislative documents, registration forms, identity cards, and reports, Dr. Taschereau Mamers traces the political and media history of Indian status in Canada, demonstrating how paperwork has been used by the state to materialise identity categories in the service of colonial governance. Her analysis of bureaucratic artefacts is led by the interventions of Indigenous artists, including Robert Houle, Nadia Myre, Cheryl L’Hirondelle, and Rebecca Belmore. Bringing together m

Fieldnotes in the Critical Study of Religion: Revisiting Classical Theorists (Bloomsbury, 2023) introduces students to the so-called classics of the field from the 19th and 20th centuries, whilst challenging readers to apply a critical lens. Instead of representing scholars and their works as virtually timeless, each contributor provides sufficient background on the classic work in question so that readers not only understand its novelty and place in its own time, but are able to arrive at a critical understanding of whether its approach to studying religion continues to be useful to them today. Scholars discussed include Muller, James, Freud and Eliade. This volume therefore offers a novel way into writing both a history and ethnography of the discipline, helping readers to see how it has changed and inviting them to consider what-if anything-endures and thereby unites these diverse authors into a common field. Richard Newton is Associate Professor and Undergraduate Director in the Department of Religious St

In the future, we’ll all be having sex with robots… won’t we? Roboticists say they’re a distracting science fiction, yet endless books, films and articles are written on the subject. Campaigns are even mounted against them. So why are sex robots such a hot topic? Electric Dreams: Sex Robots and Failed Promises of Capitalism (404 Ink, 2024) by Heather Parry picks apart the forces that posit sex robots as either the solution to our problems or a real threat to human safety, and looks at what’s being pushed aside for us to obsess about something that will never happen. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

How can we understand the changing power of race and gender to shape our reality? How shared is reality? Can narratives of experience help us develop these analyses? What role does embodiment play in shaping experience? In A Phenomenology for Women of Color: Merleau-Ponty and Identity-in-Difference (Lexington Books, 2024), Emily S. Lee uses the tools of critical phenomenology to deeply engage with the theoretical work of women of color to approach these questions. Through reconstructing phenomenological approaches, particularly as developed by Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Lee helps us see past a naturalization of the identity group “women of color” to understand more deeply the coalitional struggle its articulation involves. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

Settler Ecologies: The Enduring Nature of Settler Colonialism in Kenya (University of Toronto Press, 2024) tells the story of how settler colonialism becomes memorialized and lives on through ecological relations. Drawing on eight years of research in Laikipia, Kenya, Charis Enns and Brock Bersaglio use immersive methods to reveal how animals and plants can be enrolled in the reproduction of settler colonialism. The book details how ecological relations have been unmade and remade to enable settler colonialism to endure as a structure in this part of Kenya. It describes five modes of violent ecological transformation used to prolong structures of settler colonialism: eliminating undesired wild species; rewilding landscapes with more desirable species to settler ecologists; selectively repeopling wilderness to create seemingly more inclusive wild spaces and capitalize on biocultural diversity; rescuing injured animals and species at risk of extinction to shore up moral support for settler ecologies; and extend

This provocative and interesting book has received considerable attention. Roaring reviews and interviews include  The Financial Times (UK), The Telegraph (UK), Modem (Radio Switzerland Italian), Hufftington Post (Italy), El Diario (Spain), ABC (Australia), History Today (UK), The New Republic (USA), The New Yorker (USA), among others around the world. During the interview, Alfani tells of the challenges of putting together. Also, how the book builds on prior research and his interests in diverse fields in social sciences. About the book: How the rich and the super-rich throughout Western history accumulated their wealth, behaved (or misbehaved) and helped (or didn't help) their communities in times of crisis. The rich have always fascinated, sometimes in problematic ways. Medieval thinkers feared that the super-rich would act 'as gods among men'; much more recently Thomas Piketty made wealth central to discussions of inequality. In this book, Guido Alfani offers a history of the rich and super-rich in the We

From the theatre mask and masquerade to the masked criminal and the rise of facial recognition software, masks have long performed as an instrument for the protection and concealment of identity. Even as they conceal and protect, masks – as faces – are an extension of the self. At the same time, they are a part of material culture: what are masks made of? What traces do they leave behind? Acknowledging that that mask-wearing has become increasingly weaponized and politicised, in Mask (Bloomsbury, 2024) Dr. Sharrona Pearl looks at the politics of the mask, exploring how identity itself is read on this object. By exploring who we do (and do not) seek to protect through different forms of masking, Dr. Pearl's long history of masks helps us to better understand what it is we value. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose forthcoming book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Ango