New Books In Critical Theory

How can we de-colonize critical theory from within, and reimagine the way it grounds its normative claims as well as the way it relates to post- and de-colonial theory? Amy Allen (Philosophy and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Penn State University) takes up this project in her book The End of Progress: Decolonizing the Normative Foundations of Critical Theory (Columbia Univ. Press, 2016). The work challenges the way that the Frankfurt School of critical theory constructs and deploys concepts of normativity, history, and progress, in the process offering rich interpretations of Jürgen Habermas, Axel Honneth, and Rainer Forst. Allen then turns to the work of Theodor Adorno and Michel Foucault in order to articulate a different perspective on these issues, one that enables a radical self-critique and de-colonization of critical theory. She concludes by exploring alternative means for critical theory to justify its normative claims as a way for it to more deeply engage with post- and de-colonial t

Nadim Bakhshov joins the New Books in Network to discuss his book Against Capitalist Education: What is Education for? (Zero Books, 2015). The book posits new alternatives to educational thought and philosophy through an innovated, yet classic, style of dialogue between two characters, John and George, whom both channel philosophers, intellectuals, and great thinkers in history. You can connect to the guest via his Twitter at @nadimbakhshov or website, and also listen to his podcast on the subject here. For questions or comments on the New Books in Education podcast, you can connect to the host at @PoliticsAndEd.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

With the growth of social media like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Snapchat, we are increasingly heading toward a radically open society. In Sharing our Lives Online: Risks and Exposure in Social Media (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), author David R. Brake explores some of the social and individual harms that can arise from unwary social media use. Brake draws upon in-depth interviews with bloggers as well as scholarly research to explore why users may inadvertently reveal more online than they suppose. He explains in detail the social, technological, and commercial influences and pressures that keep us posting what we often shouldn’t and that prevent us from fully appreciating the risks when we do so.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The experience of the African American middle class has been an important area of research in the USA. However, the British experience has, by comparison, not been subject to the same amount of attention, particularly with regard to the middle class experience of education. Dr. Nicola Rollock, Deputy Director, Centre for Research in Race & Education and Senior Lecturer at the University of Birmingham’s School of Education, along with her co-authors, explores this under researched area in The Colour of Class: The Educational Strategies of the Black Middle Classes (Routledge, 2014). Drawing on Critical Race Theory, the idea of intersectionality, and Bourdieu, the book depicts the strategies associated with choosing schools, the narratives of families’ educational experiences, along with the legacy of racism within the British education system. The book is an important intervention into recent debates around educational attainment, charting the changing strategies, and changing perceptions, held

Finn Brunton‘s Spam: A Shadow History of the Internet (MIT Press, 2013) is a cultural history of those communications that seek to capture our attention for the purposes of exploiting it. From pranks on early computer networks in the 1970s to commercial nuisances in the 1990s to the global criminal infrastructure of today driven by botnets and algorithms, spam’s history surfaces and shifts with the Internet itself. Spam is a lively book packed with tales of the people responsible for sharing and stopping spam’s myriad of forms in email, web sites and social networks. This includes everyone from programmers and security professionals, marketers and lawyers, and con artists and thieves to name a few. Each person has personal experiences with spam and opinions about when they’re being spammed, but Brunton, a professor at New York University, reminds us about the critical role that communities, organizations, and governments have played in regulating spam. Ultimately, the governance agreed

What is cultural taste? How is it formed, imagined and patterned? In Understanding Cultural Taste: Sensation, Skill and Sensibility (Palgrave MacMillan, 2015), David Wright, Associate Professor at the University of Warwick, explores the theories and practices framing cultural taste in contemporary society in order to account for the social role of cultural taste. The book explains how taste is made knowable, through quantification and measurement, moves through an explanation of differing cultural taste patterns, including the all important figure of the omnivore, and narrates the impact of technology on cultural taste. The book accounts for the governing and globalisation of cultural taste, thinking through the rise of cosmopolitan tastes, as well as engaging with ideas about taste and expertise. The book uses a range of examples, including detailed discussions of contemporary art works such as Greyson Perry’s The lovely consensus. Although grounded in sociology, the book speaks to debates, and thus to

What stories do we tell about finance? How does financial print culture shape our lives? Our guest today explores the narratives we have been told, and tell, about finance. A literary scholar, Leigh Claire La Berge writes about the representations of finance in years after 1979 and how many of the stories we tell about finance–that it is abstract and exceedingly complicated–took hold in this era. Leigh Claire La Berge is Assistant Professor of English in the Department of English at Borough of Manhattan Community College, CUNY. Her book, Scandals and Abstraction: Financial Fiction of the Long 1980s, was recently published by Oxford University Press.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Every city seems to be ‘creative’, whether because it has a creative brand, a creative quarter or is home to creative industries. In his new book Urban Subversion and the Creative City Routledge, 2015), Oli Mould shows how this is an essential, but mistaken, aspect of the neo-liberal city. Creativity in the governance of the neo-liberal city erases and obscures inequalities and prohibits social justice. The book demonstrates a very different way of thinking about the creative city through a variety of subversive practices, from skateboarding and parkour, to urban explorations. Filled with images and global examples, the book will attract readers in geography, urban studies, sociology, cultural studies, as well as anyone interested in alternative forms of urban life. Mould also works across multiple media forms, and you can see more about the visual elements of Urban Subversion here, and read his blog and twitter feed.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What does it mean to be free? How can paying attention to the relationship between freedom and slavery help construct a concept and practice of freedom that is “perpetual, unfinished, and rooted in acts of flight” (181)? In his book Freedom as Marronage University of Chicago Press, 2015), Neil Roberts (Africana Studies, Religion, and Political Science, Williams College) explores this and many other questions. Proceeding from and working with the concept and practice of marronage – modes of escape from slavery emerging from the Caribbean – Roberts articulates a theory of freedom that is historically specific while having trans-historical reverberations, and that is attentive to lived experiences of freedom and slavery. In doing so, he engages histories of the transatlantic slave trade, colonialism, diaspora, the Haitian Revolution, and American slavery. Arguing for the need to creolize political theory and philosophy, Roberts also takes up the thought and practice of W.E.B. DuBois, Hann

In Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital (Verso, 2015), author Jason W. Moore seeks to undermine popular understandings of the relationship among society, environment, and capitalism. Rather, than seeing society and environment as acting on an external, nonhuman nature, Moore wants us to recognize capitalism-in-nature. For Moore, seeing society and environment as separate has hampered clear thinking on the problems we face, such as climate change or the end of cheap nature, as well as political solutions to these issues. His book is an analysis of the interrelationship of capitalism and nature over the past few centuries as well as a critique of important environmental concepts such as the Anthropocene. Moore is assistant professor of sociology at SUNY-Binghamton and coordinator of the World Ecology Research Network. This book is a product of over a decade of research and writings on world ecology and evidence of his wide-ranging scholarship.Learn more about your ad choices. V

What are the alternatives to the current neo-liberal cultural settlement prevailing in much of the global north? In To Defend the Revolution is to Defend Culture: The Cultural Policy of The Cuban Revolution (PM Press, 2015), Rebecca Gordon-Nesbitt, from The Centre for Cultural Change, argues that this question can be addressed by learning from the cultural policy of the Cuban revolution. The book draws on a wealth of archival material, coupled with the theoretical framework of Marxist Humanism, to give a detailed picture of the revolutionary period on the island and chart the lessons from that era. The book introduces the key policy documents and events, along with examples from a variety of cultural forms, including a detailed engagement with the role of film and cinema in the revolutionary era. The book will be essential reading for cultural studies and cultural policy scholars, alongside anyone seeking an alternative vision of culture’s social role.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm

So many of our social questions are now the subject of analysis from economics. In A Richer Life: How Economics can Change the Way We Think and Feel (Penguin, 2015), Phillip Roscoe, a reader at the University of St Andrew’s School of Management, offers a critique of the long march of economics into social life. The book covers a vast range of social examples, including dating, organ transplantation, and education, alongside accessible engagements with historical and contemporary economic theory. Using personal examples as well as academic expertise, Roscoe’s book offers a primer in the social cost of economics, as well as what we can do to resit and challenge economistic modes of thought.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Popular culture has been transformed in its attitudes towards disability, as representations across media forms continues to respond to the contemporary politics of disability. In Disability and Popular Culture: Focusing Passion, Creating Community and Expressing Defiance (Ashgate, 2015), Katie Ellis, a Senior Research Fellow at Curtin University, uses critical perspectives from disability studies to both challenge and celebrate the place of disability in popular culture. The book thinks through ideas of beauty, the role of children’s toys, representations in television and music, as well as science fiction and sport. Alongside the range of sites of disability and popular culture, the book closes with a case study of social media and the limits of inspirational images. The book is essential reading for cultural studies scholars, but raises important questions for a general readership.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The French philosopher Alain Badiou is not best known for his engagement with ecological matters per se. Badiou’s insights regarding being, truth, and political militancy are, however, highly relevant for the consideration of “the ecological question.” Based on a doctoral thesis written under Badiou’s supervision, Am Johal‘s new book, Ecological Metapolitics: Badiou and the Anthropocene(Atropos Press, 2015) is a thinking through and with Badiou’s work while addressing some of the most pressing concerns of our time: the relationship between human beings, technology, and nature; the meaning of change; and the possibilities of democratic politics and resistance. This, during an era that many now refer to as the “Anthropocene,” a period in which the impact of human beings on geological conditions and change has become unmistakable. Ecological Metapolitics is a work of engaged philosophy that will illuminate readers’ understanding of Badiou’s oeuvre. The

Did you notice that after 9/11, the depiction of torture on prime-time television went up nearly seven hundred percent? Hilary Neroni did. She had just finished a book on the changing relationship between female characters and violence in narrative cinema, and was attuned to function of violence in film and television. This was around the time the Abu Ghraib torture photos were leaked to the public. Over the next 10 years, torture porn appeared in the Saw and Hostel films, and it seemed that torture quickly became a routine element of thriller plots in movies and TV, such as the series 24. In The Subject of Torture: Psychoanalysis and Biopolitics in Television and Film (Columbia University Press, 2015), Neroni makes a compelling case that, prior to 9/11, the stage had already been set for the dehumanizing fantasy of torture to appear in mass culture – via biopolitics. With this book, Neroni takes on the task of defining and understanding torture through a psychoanalytic lens, using films and television

Owning property. Being property. Becoming propertyless. These are three themes of white possession that structure Aileen Moreton-Robinson’s brilliant new inquiry into the dynamics of race and Indigeneity in “postcolonizing” societies like Australia.The White Possessive: Property, Power, and Indigenous Sovereignty (University of Minnesota Press, 2015) collects and expands over a decade of work that speaks to key dynamics both at the heart, and sometimes obscured, within critical Indigenous studies. A Goenpul scholar from Minjerribah (Stradbroke Island), Quandamooka First Nation (Moreton Bay) in Queensland, Australia, Aileen Moreton-Robinson is the author of numerous previous books and articles in the fields of law and sovereignty, whiteness, race and feminism, and is a Council Member of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

How has American cultural and artistic policy changed over the last 25 years? Performing Policy: How Contemporary Politics and Cultural Programmes Redefined US Artists for the Twenty-First Century (Palgrave, 2014) explains the process of policy-making, funding models, NGOs and specific places that have shaped the current cultural settlement in the USA. Paul Bonin-Rodriguez’s book uses examples of policy reports, theatre and cross-arts organisations, as well as drawing on debates about creative platemaking. The multi-disciplinary approach allows Performing Policy to speak directly to the history of arts funding, in the context of the U.S.’s culture wars, as well as to the contemporary question of the role and purpose of the artist in society, along with how those artists might be educated. The book will be important reading for cultural policy and arts management students, as well as those in cultural studies.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Literary practices are often associated with specific social groups in particular social settings. Kate Pahl‘s Materializing Literacies in Communities: The Uses of Literacy Revisited (Bloomsbury, 2014) challenges these assumptions by showing the varieties of literary practice in Rotherham, England. The book engages with the locally particular to draw out a variety of general findings, relevant to methodological reflection and material culture debates. The book draws on a wealth of projects from the AHRC funded Connected Communities programme, including Fishing as Wisdom, The Imagine Project, and Language as Talisman. The book represents an important intervention into how we understand community, literacy and identity.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Eugene Thacker‘s wonderful Horror of Philosophy series includes three books – In the Dust of this Planet (Zero Books, 2011), Starry Speculative Corpse (Zero Books, 2015), and Tentacles Longer than Night (Zero Books, 2015) – that collectively explore the relationship between philosophy (especially as it overlaps with demonology, occultism, and mysticism) and horror (especially of the supernatural sort). Each book takes on a particular problematic using a particular form from the history of philosophy, from the quaestio, lectio, and disputatio of medieval scholarship, to shorter aphoristic prose, to productive “mis-readings” of works of horror as philosophical texts and vice versa. Taken together, the books thoughtfully model the possibilities born of a comparative scholarly approach that creates conversations among works that might not ordinarily be juxtaposed in the same work: like Nishitani, Kant, Yohji Yamamoto, and Fludd; or Argento, Dante, and Lautramont. Though they explore

Valuation is a central question in contemporary social science. Indeed the question of value has a range of academic projects associated with it, whether in terms of specific questions or in terms of emerging fora for academic publications. In Value Practices in the Life Sciences and Medicine (Oxford University Press, 2015), Isabelle Dussauge, Claes-Fredrik Helgesson, and Francis Lee bring together a range of authors to outline a new research programme. Alongside individual essays that range from the allocation of transplant organs, questions of plagiarism in science, the ownership of generically modified organisms though to desire and neuroscience, the book points to a new way to think through questions of valuation. As a result its importance moves beyond an STS audience to establish value practices as a vital framework for understanding contemporary life.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices