New Books In Critical Theory

Katharine Jenkins offers an introduction to feminist philosophy, giving the reader an idea of what it is, why it is important, and how to think about it. She explores key topics such as gender oppression, beauty, objectification, and sexuality. Moreover, she considers questions about the relation between the personal and the political, what it is to be a woman, whether there is a distinctive kind of women's knowledge, and what feminist philosophy can bring to our understanding of such aspects of our world as justice, work, and the environment. Feminist Philosophy: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford UP, 2025) takes a richly intersectional approach, recognizing the combined impact of such factors as race and class as well as gender. Katharine Jenkins is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Glasgow, and was previously Assistant Professor at the University of Nottingham. She specialises in social philosophy, especially feminist philosophy and social ontology. She is the author of Ontology and Oppression:

The Revival of Platonism in Cicero's Late Philosophy: Platonis Aemulus and the Invention of Cicero (Lexington Books, 2016) argues that Cicero deserves to be spoken of with more respect and to be studied with greater care. Using Plato's influence on Cicero's life and writings as a clue, Altman reveals the ineffable combination of qualities that enabled Cicero not only to revive Platonism, but also to rival Plato himself. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

The European left seemed to be in rude health during the 1970s. Never had so many political parties committed to representing the working class been in power simultaneously across the continent. New forms of mobilisation led by female, immigrant, and young wage-earners seemed to reflect the growing strength of the workers' movement rather than its pending obsolescence. Parties and trade unions grew rapidly as a diverse new generation entered the ranks. Why did the left's forward march halt so abruptly?  The Halted March of the European Left: The Working Class in Britain, France, and Italy, 1968-1989 (Oxford UP, 2025)shows how the left's defeats after the mid-1970s were not the inevitable result of de-industrialisation or, more precisely, the transition to a globalised and post-Fordist world that abolished the working class as a great historical actor. Choices that were made during a concentrated but decisive moment contributed to the left's lost battles. The British, French, and Italian left managed the

Plato is a key figure from the beginnings of Western philosophy, yet the impact of his lived experience on his thought has rarely been explored. Born during a war that would lead to Athens’ decline, Plato lived in turbulent times. In Plato: A Civic Life (Reaktion, 2025), Carol Atack explores how Plato’s life in Athens influenced his thought, how he developed the Socratic dialogue into a powerful philosophical tool, and how he used the institutions of Athenian society to create a compelling imaginative world. Accessibly written, this book shows how Plato made Athens the place where diverse ideas were integrated into a new way of approaching the big questions about our lives, then and now. Carol Atack teaches classical Greek and ancient philosophy at the University of Cambridge. She is the author and coauthor of two books, most recently Anachronism and Antiquity. Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Crit

How is it possible to be a subject when faced with oppression? The revolutionary thought and work of French novelist and lesbian thinker Monique Wittig are today in dialogue with feminist and LGBTQIA+ analyses and politics. Her materialist theorization of lesbianism subfuses contemporary feminism and queer political and social movements. By proposing a detailed analysis of heterosexuality as a total political regime, Wittig as a theorist, writer, and activist opens up the possibility of a world beyond the categories of sex and gender, founded on a new definition of the human. This book acts as a roadmap to help us reach such a horizon. Sara Garbagnoli and her co-author Natacha Chetcuti-Osorovitz situate Wittig within array of feminist movements of the 20th century and explain why her theories are so pertinent in today's political landscape. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

This is a very special episode of the New Books Network, as the editor of Conversations with Kiese Laymon (UP of Mississippi, 2025), Dr. Constance Bailey, discusses the process of selecting, compiling, and publishing the volume with the subject himself, award-winning author, Kiese Laymon. Conversations with Kiese Laymon provides an in-depth look at Laymon as an educator, creative writer, activist, family member, and Mississippian. Interviews capture surprising insights into Laymon’s life and craft. Within the book’s pages, Laymon talks about his engagement with other writers, including Richard Wright, William Faulkner, and Eudora Welty. These revelations situate his memoir, Heavy, among other great Mississippi autobiographies and memoirs, such as Anne Moody’s Coming of Age in Mississippi, Welty’s One Writer’s Beginnings, Jesmyn Ward’s Men We Reaped, and Natasha Trethewey’s Memorial Drive. In other interviews, he discusses his obsession with revision and deftly fields questions about pop culture, politics, an

While scholars of social and political movements tend to analyze tactics in terms of their effectiveness in achieving specific outcomes, Robert F. Carley argues by contrast that tactics are, above all, what social movements do. They are not mere means to an end so much as they are a public form of expression pointing out injustices and making just demands. Rooted in a highly original analysis of the tactically mediated relationship between race and mobilization in the work of Italian philosopher and revolutionary Antonio Gramsci, Culture and Tactics: Gramsci, Race, and the Politics of Practice (SUNY Press, 2019) demonstrates how tactics impact the organizational structures of social movements and expand the affinities of political communities. Carley looks at how Gramsci used innovative tactics to bridge perceptions of racial differences between factory workers and subaltern groups, the latter having been denigrated to the point of subhumanity by a complex Italian national racial economy. Newly envisioning Gr

Academics and popular commentors have expressed common sentiments about the Black Power movement of the 1960s and 1970s—that it was male dominated and overrun with autocratic leaders. Yet women’s strategizing, management, and sustained work were integral to movement organizations’ functioning, and female advocates of cultural nationalism often exhibited a unique service-oriented, collaborative leadership style.Essential Soldiers: Women Activists and Black Power Movement Leadership (New York University Press, 2025) documents a variety of women Pan-African nationalists’ experiences, considering the ways they produced a distinctive kind of leadership through their devotion and service to the struggle for freedom and equality. Relying on oral histories, textual archival material, and scholarly literature, this book delves into women’s organizing and resistance efforts, investigating how they challenged the one-dimensional notions of gender roles within cultural nationalist organizations. Revealing a form of Black

Conspiracy, mutiny and liberation on America’s waterfront by the award-winning author of The Slave Ship. Freedom Ship: The Uncharted History of Escaping Slavery by Sea (Penguin Group, 2025) is a gripping history of stowaway slaves and the vessels that carried them to liberty. Up to 100,000 fugitives successfully fled the horrors of bondage in the American South. Many were ushered clandestinely northwards from safe house to safe house: know as the Underground Railway. Thousands of others escaped not by land, but by sea. Their dramatic tales of whispered conspiracy and billowing sails make Freedom Ship essential and enthralling reading.Through the intricate riverways of the Carolinas to the banks of the Chesapeake Bay, Freedom Ship traces the freedom seekers who turned their sights to the sea. Sailaways regularly arrived in Britain on cotton ships from New York or Southern ports. For example, Moses Roper, one of the most determined runaways in American history, traveled 350 miles through slave country before

In this episode Pat speaks with Dr Anya Daly. Dr Anya Daly investigates the intersections of phenomenology with philosophy of mind, the philosophy of perception, the philosophy of psychiatry, embodied and social cognition, enactivism, ethics, aesthetics and Buddhist Philosophy. They discuss meditation and perception, the divide between continental and analytic philosophy, and human and animal lifeworlds. A transcript of this episode will be available on the Concept : Art website here. Concept : Art is produced on muwinina Country, lutruwita Tasmania. Always was, always will be Aboriginal land. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

n a novel pairing of anti-colonial theorist Frantz Fanon with Marxist-Lacanian philosopher Slavoj Žižek, Zahi Zalloua explores the ways both thinkers expose the violence of political structures.This inventive exploration advances an anti-racist critique, describing how ontology operates in a racial matrix to produce some human bodies that count and others (deemed not-quite- or non-human) that do not. For Fanon and Žižek, the violence of ontology must be met with another form of violence, a revolutionary violence that delegitimizes the logic of the symbolic order and troubles its collective fantasies. Whereas Fanon begins his challenge to ontology by exposing its historical linkages to Europe's destructive imperialist procedures before proceeding to “stretch” Marxism, along with psychoanalysis, to account for the crushing (neo)colonial situation, Žižek premises his work on the refusal to accept the totality of ontology. Because of these different points of intervention, Fanon and Žižek together offer a powerfu

Are we already living in some kind of fascist or technocratic dystopia? How do we avert the AI dystopia? These are the types of things that you'll see thrown about in op-eds and analysis pieces all over the net and the press. Dystopia is doing some kind of work in our political vocabulary that goes beyond a reference to those iconic dystopian novels or their sort of contemporary successors. … Sometimes politics seems to be so absorbed in the train of fantasy and the imaginary that it becomes worrying. But like it or not, or like specific expressions of the political imagination or not, the political arena is an arena of the imagination. Habermas once said that people don't fight for abstractions, but they do battle with images.                                                                                                                    – Matthew Benjamin Cole, NBN interview 2025 After centuries of contemplating utopias, late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century writers began to warn of dystopian fut

Why is radio so white? In Listeners Like Who? Exclusion and Resistance in the Public Radio Industry (Princeton UP, 2025) Laura Garbes, a Sociologist and Assistant Professor at the University of Minnesota - Twin Cities, explores the history of public radio, theorising it as a white institutional space. Alongside the rich history and theoretical framework, the book draws on a range of interviews with radio workers, revealing how stories are chosen and supported, expertise and perspectives are included and excluded, and how radio workers of colour are challenging and changing the radio industry. Published at a time when public radio faces an uncertain future, the book is essential reading across the social sciences and humanities, and for anyone interested how to support a more diverse media industry. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

Inspired by leaders such as Andrew Tate and Jordan Peterson, the online Manosphere has exploded in recent years. Dedicated to anti-feminism, these communities have orchestrated online campaigns of misogynistic harassment, with some individuals going as far as committing violent terrorist attacks. Although the Manosphere has become a focus point of the media, researchers and governments alike, discussions tend to either over-sensationalize the community or offer simplistic explanations for their existence. This book uses a mixture of historical and economic analysis, alongside actual Manosphere content, to delve deeper. With The Male Complaint: The Manosphere and Misogyny Online (Polity, 2025), Simon James Copland explains how the Manosphere has developed and why it appeals to so many men. He argues that the Manosphere is not an aberration, but is deeply embedded within mainstream, neoliberal, social structures. For a cohort of alienated men, the promise of community provides a space of understanding, connect

What do children believe in? In Growing Up Godless: Non-Religious Childhoods in Contemporary England (Princeton UP, 2025) Anna Strhan, a Reader in the Department of Sociology at the University of York and Rachael Shillitoe, a senior social scientist in the UK civil service and honorary fellow in the Department of Sociology at the University of York use ethnography and interviews with young people and parents at a variety of schools in England to examine current forms of non-religiosity. The book explores how children make meaning and sense of their world, offering an account that foregrounds their sense of ethical commitments and their beliefs in key humanistic ideas. Theoretically rich, and with a wealth of fascinating empirical material, the book will be of interest 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

Pricing Lives: The Political Art of Measurement (Oxford UP, 2023) discusses how human lives are equated with the material, and argues that pricing lives lies at the core of the political; in fact, as in Plato or Hobbes, and in the Weberian ethics of responsibility, measurement is considered to be one of its central features. Ariel Colonomos argues that this measure relies primarily on human lives and interests, and that the material equivalence to lives is twofold. The equivalence is a double equation, as we pay for lives and we pay with lives. This double equation constitutes the measurement upon which the political equilibrium of a society depends and is thus a key constitutive part of the political. The book adopts two approaches, both with an interdisciplinary perspective: one explanatory and the other normative. First, it explains the nexus between existential goods and material goods, drawing on a detailed analysis of several case studies from contemporary politics, both domestic and international. Seco

An Arendt expert has arrived at Arendt-obsessed Recall This Book. Lyndsey Stonebridge discusses her widely praised 2024 We Are Free to Change the World: Hannah Arendt’s Lessons in Love and Disobedience. Lesley sees both radical evil and the banality of evil at work in Nazi Germany and in the causes of suffering and death in Gaza today. She compares the moral idiocy of authoritarians (like the murderous Nazis and those who are starving Gaza) to that of philosophers who cannot hear the echoes of what they are doing. Lesley and John discuss Arendt’s belief in the fragile ethics of the Founding Fathers, with its checks and balances and its politics based not on emotion but cool deliberation. Arendt could say that “The fundamental contradiction of [America] is political freedom coupled with social slavery,”” but why was she too easy on the legacy of imperial racism in America, missing its settler-colonial logic? Arendt read W. E. B. DuBois (who saw and said this) but perhaps, says Lesley, not attentively enough.

Returning to NBN is the philosopher Santiago Zabala, here to introduce his new book Signs from the Future: A Philosophy of Warnings (Columbia University Press, 2025). Warnings, for Zabala, are not synonymous with predictions. They are instead as much about the present as the future. They point towards already present crisis and contradictions. They also attempt to reorient us towards alternative paths. Embedded deeply in the critical hermeneutics of writers such as Heidegger, Arendt and Beauvoir but exploring contemporary issues such as gender, climate change and machine warfare, Zabala’s book is an accessible and applicable text that simultaneously tries to destabilize us in our present complacency while grounding us in an urgent need to seek alternatives. Santiago Zabala is ICREA Research Professor of Philosophy at the Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona. He is the author of numerous books, including one previously discussed on this show, Being at Large: Freedom in the Age of Alternative Facts. Learn more

David McNally's Slavery and Capitalism: A New Marxist History (U California Press, 2025)presents the first systematic Marxist account of the capitalist character of Atlantic slavery. McNally argues that enslaved labour within the plantation system constituted capitalist commodity production, and crucially, reframes the resistance of enslaved people as profound labour struggles. He posits a "social conception of freedom", contrasting it with the liberal individualist view, asserting that for enslaved people, freedom was communal and collective, as no individual could break the structures of slavery alone. The book revives a "forgotten critical Marxist tradition" that consistently upheld the capitalist nature of New World slavery, drawing on three crucial thinkers: C.L.R. James, who argued that the collective labour of enslaved sugar cane workers on Haitian plantations was "closer to a modern proletariat than any group of workers in the world at the time". W.E.B. Du Bois, who described the overthrow

Michel Foucault's thought, Maddalena Cerrato writes, may be understood as practical philosophy. In this perspective, political analysis, philosophy of history, epistemology, and ethics appear as necessarily cast together in a philosophical project that aims to rethink freedom and emancipation from domination of all kinds. The idea of practical philosophy accounts for Foucault's specific approach to the object, as well as to the task of philosophy, and it identifies the perspective that led him to consider the question of subjectivity as the guiding thread of his work. Overall, in Michel Foucault's Practical Philosophy: A Critique of Subjectivation Processes (SUNY Press, 2025) Cerrato shows the deep consistency underlying Foucault's reflection and the substantial coherence of his philosophical itinerary, setting aside all the conventional interpretations that pivot on the idea that his thought underwent a radical "turn" from the political engagement of the question of power toward an ethical retrieval of the