Search results for ""Collective""
Oxford University Press The Sacred in the Modern World: A Cultural Sociological Approach
It is often claimed that we live in a secular age. But we do not live in a desacralized one. Sacred forms--whether in 'religious' or 'secular' guise--continue to shape social life in the modern world, giving rise to powerful emotions, polarized group identities, and even the very concept of moral society. Analyzing contemporary sacred forms is essential if we are to be able to make sense of the societies we live in and think critically about the effects of the sacred on our lives for good or ill. The Sacred in the Modern World is a major contribution to this task. Re-interpreting Durkheim's theory of the sacred, and drawing on the 'strong program' in cultural sociology, Gordon Lynch sets out a theory of the sacred that can be used by researchers across a range of humanities and social science disciplines. Using vividly drawn contemporary case material - including the abuse and neglect of children in Irish residential schools and the controversy over the BBC's decision not to air an appeal for aid for Gaza--the book demonstrates the value of this theoretical approach for social and cultural analysis. The key role of public media for the circulation and contestation of the sacred comes under close scrutiny. Adopting a critical stance towards sacred forms, Lynch reflects upon the ways in which sacred commitments can both serve as a moral resource for social life and legitimate horrifying acts of collective evil. He concludes by reflecting on how we might live thoughtfully and responsibility under the light and shadow that the sacred casts, asking whether society without the sacred is possible or desirable.
£34.56
Edward Elgar Publishing Ltd Governing Transformative Technological Innovation: Who’s in Charge?
New technologies often appear to be beyond the control of any existing governing systems. This is especially true for transformative technologies such as information technologies, biotechnologies and nanotechnologies. Peter Phillips examines in this book the deep governing structures of transformative technology and innovation in an effort to identify which actors can be expected to act when, under what conditions and to what effect. He analyzes the life cycles of an array of examples where converging technologies have created transformations and supervisory challenges.The author begins by providing assessments of the concepts of transformative technology, innovation, and related regulatory difficulties. He then evaluates the various tools commonly used to examine governing systems, including overarching paradigms for managing transformative innovation and the models and taxonomies used to investigate governing via the state, the market, and civil authorities. By applying the paradigms, tools and methodologies to current transformative changes, he investigates the challenges of governing in practice: first, the systems and authorities that define knowledge; second, the structures that regulate discovery, invention and ingenuity; third, the public, private and collective processes that engage in gestating new ideas; and, finally, the distributed governing networks underlying the production and marketing of new products. The book concludes with the author's observations on the implications of using deep governing systems and an appraisal of the strengths and weaknesses of our tools of analysis.Academic specialists, practitioners and professionals in the areas of economics, management, political science, sociology, public policy and science-technology-society studies will appreciate the author's broad theoretical approach. The methodological insights will interest those policymakers working on technological change and innovation policies in regional, national and international institutions.
£110.00
Liverpool University Press Human Zoos: Science and Spectacle in the Age of Empire
‘Human zoos’, forgotten symbols of the colonial era, have been totally repressed in our collective memory. In these ‘anthropo-zoological’ exhibitions, ‘exotic’ individuals were placed alongside wild beasts and presented behind bars or in enclosures. Human zoos were a key factor, however, in the progressive shift in the West from scientific to popular racism. Beginning with the early nineteenth-century European exhibition of the Hottentot Venus, this thoroughly documented volume underlines the ways in which they affected the lives of tens of millions of visitors, from London to New York, from Warsaw to Milan, from Moscow to Tokyo… Through Barnum’s freak shows, Hagenbeck’s ‘ethnic shows’ (touring major European cities from their German base), French-style villages nègres, as well as the great universal and colonial exhibitions, the West invented the ‘savage’, exhibited the ‘peoples of the world’, whilst in many cases preparing for or contributing to their colonization… This first mass contact between ‘us’ and ‘them’, between the West and elsewhere, created an invisible border. Measured by scientists, exploited in shows, used in official exhibitions, these men, women and children became extras in an imaginary and in a history that were not their own. Based on the best-selling French volume Zoos Humains but with a number of newly commissioned chapters, Human Zoos puts into perspective the ‘spectacularization’ of the Other, a process that is at the origin of contemporary stereotypes and of the construction of our own identities. A unique book, on a crucial phenomenon, which takes us to the heart of Western fantasies, and allows us to understand the genesis of identity in Japan, Europe and North America.
£33.00
Liverpool University Press Josep Renau and the Politics of Culture in Republican Spain, 1931-1939: Re-imagining the Nation
At once pragmatic and utopian, the Spanish artist, critic and political activist Josep Renau engaged in multiple ways in the volatile cultural conflicts of interwar Europe, which converged on Spain in the Second Republic's battle to modernise both politics and society (1931-1939). Renau used his idiosyncratic artwork and agit-prop, inspired by the Constructivists and the German avant-garde, to critique the timidity of the Republic's first democratising reforms. To envision an alternative, he launched arts organisations and magazines whose goal was to begin the work of redefining Spanish national self-image through cultural innovation. The ideas Renau developed would soon come to shape government policy during the war in Spain (1936-39) when Renau served as the Republic's Director General of Fine Arts. In power, Renau was a tireless cultural innovator, whose initiatives not only helped mobilise tens of thousands of Republicans but also shaped the new collective imaginaries emerging from the conflict. This book offers the first interdisciplinary and contextualised analysis of the relationship between art and politics in Renau's work at the time of Spain's pivotal attempt to pursue democratic forms of modernisation. It traces the connections between Renau's political goals and the specific visual strategies he deployed, providing a comprehensive historical assessment of his attempts to turn protean theory into effective practice. In spite of the Republic's military defeat, Renau's work, and the wartime cultural programme he inspired and impelled, offer fertile material for debates on the dynamic relationship between culture and democracy in ways which remain as relevant and urgent today as they were when Renau took up the challenge.
£32.50
Boydell & Brewer Ltd The Culture of Controversy: Religious Arguments in Scotland, 1660-1714
Illuminating the development and character of Scottish Protestantism, The Culture of Controversy proposes new ways of understanding religion and politics in early modern Scotland. The Culture of Controversy investigates arguments about religion in Scotland from the Restoration to the death of Queen Anne and outlines a new model for thinking about collective disagreement in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century societies. Rejecting teleological concepts of the 'public sphere', the book instead analyses religious debates in terms of a distinctively early modern 'culture of controversy'. This culture was less rational and less urbanised than the public sphere. Traditional means of communication such as preaching and manuscript circulation were more important than newspapers and coffeehouses. As well as verbal forms of discourse, controversial culture was characterised by actions, rituals and gestures. People from all social ranks and all regions of Scotland were involved in religious arguments, but popular participation remained of questionable legitimacy. Through its detailedand innovative examination of the arguments raging between and within Scotland's main religious groups, the presbyterians and episcopalians, over such issues as Church government, state oaths and nonconformity, The Culture ofControversy reveals hitherto unexamined debates about religious enthusiasm, worship and clerical hypocrisy. It also illustrates the changing nature of the fault line between the presbyterians and episcopalians and contextualises the emerging issues of religious toleration and articulate irreligion. Illuminating the development and character of Scottish Protestantism, The Culture of Controversy proposes new ways of understanding religion and politics in late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century Scotland and will be particularly valuable to all those with an interest in early modern British history. Alasdair Raffe is Lecturer in History at Northumbria University, Newcastle upon Tyne.
£85.00
Emerald Publishing Limited Individualism, Holism and the Central Dilemma of Sociological Theory
Individualism and holism, the concepts embedded in the title of this book, represent two key theoretical perspectives that have for many decades steered and shaped sociological thought. For over a century these two interpretative perspectives have also divided sociological theory into two camps, accompanied by a band of scholars trying to bridge this dualism. According to American sociologist Jeffrey C. Alexander, individualist theories derive their appeal and strength from their underlying assumption that humans make decisions as individual, free, autonomous, and rationally and morally consistent beings. A related belief is that they are able to express these qualities in their actions regardless of the situation in society or what economic or moral conditions prevail. Holistic, or collectivist, theories, unlike individualism, assign primacy to social entities. This perspective is important because it creates the basic precondition through which entities can become the subject of deliberate sociological analysis. However, there is a price for fulfilling this precondition. The emphasis it places on the collective, and on larger entities, logically means that the individual will and free human decision-making tends to be lost from the field of view. This book argues that these two perspectives, individualist and holistic, form the central dilemma of sociological thought. It provides an extensive review and critique of contemporary sociological approaches to this antinomy and examines attempts that have been made to overcome it and unite them. Moreover, the book proposes a new approach to solving this dilemma via the concept of 'critical reconfigurationism', arguing that the resolution of this dilemma is vital not just for sociological theory but also for empirical social research.
£69.14
Edward Elgar Publishing Ltd Leadership by Resentment: From Ressentiment to Redemption
What do such disparate events as Occupy Wall Street, Iran's Islamic revolution and Venezuela's socialist revolution have in common? Often, resentment based on past grievances or shortcomings seems to emerge from the depths of individual and collective psyches over the course of such emotionally charged movements. This resentment, and the related philosophical concept of ressentiment, can have a profound impact on the course of history and on the role of leadership within societies. Expanding on the concept of ressentiment, this book addresses the importance of emotions in historical events. The author explores the conditions that foster the development of ressentiment, the role of leaders and followers, and the phases of the phenomenon as it encourages destructive behaviors such as murder and suicide. Often considered an incurable disease with destructive social and political repercussions, it is a core motive for acts of terrorism, revolutions, social upheavals and processes of toxic leadership. The author puts forth a model that helps to describe certain historical processes led by ressentiment, like some revolutions and terrorist acts, and to distinguish them from other movements that are usually treated as similar (e.g., independence revolutions). The book then tackles a seemingly impossible question: Can we find a cure for this powerful and destructive impulse? With care and deliberation, the author demonstrates the power of ethical leadership, recognition and redemption as positive unifying forces during human conflicts. A philosophical endeavor to understand events from the Boston Tea Party to Occupy Wall Street, from the French revolution to Hugo Chavez's revolution in Venezuela, this book will be fascinating reading for scholars and students of the social sciences and humanities and those with a particular interest in leadership.
£30.95
Potomac Books Inc The Great Kosher Meat War of 1902: Immigrant Housewives and the Riots That Shook New York City
2020–21 Reader Views Literary Award, Gold Medal Winner 2021 Independent Publisher Book Award, Gold Medal Winner 2020 National Jewish Book Award Finalist In the wee hours of May 15, 1902, three thousand Jewish women quietly took up positions on the streets of Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Convinced by the latest jump in the price of kosher meat that they were being gouged, they assembled in squads of five, intent on shutting down every kosher butcher shop in New York’s Jewish quarter. What was conceived as a nonviolent effort did not remain so for long. Customers who crossed the picket lines were heckled and assaulted and their parcels of meat hurled into the gutters. Butchers who remained open were attacked, their windows smashed, stock ruined, equipment destroyed. Brutal blows from police nightsticks sent women to local hospitals and to court. But soon Jewish housewives throughout the area took to the streets in solidarity, while the butchers either shut their doors or had their doors shut for them. The newspapers called it a modern Jewish Boston Tea Party.The Great Kosher Meat War of 1902 tells the twin stories of mostly uneducated women immigrants who discovered their collective consumer power and of the Beef Trust, the midwestern cartel that conspired to keep meat prices high despite efforts by the U.S. government to curtail its nefarious practices. With few resources and little experience but steely determination, this group of women organized themselves into a potent fighting force and, in their first foray into the political arena in their adopted country, successfully challenged powerful, vested corporate interests and set a pattern for future generations to follow.
£22.99
Inner Traditions Bear and Company The Book of Primal Signs: The High Magic of Symbols
From ancient rock and cave art to the contemporary brand logos of politics and business, human beings have always created symbols to denote specific ideas, groups, or important objects as well as to convey deeper information than can be communicated in words. Many glyphs have retained their meanings over millennia whereas some have modern meanings vastly different from the original connotation. In this study of symbols, Nigel Pennick explores glyphs as agents of higher consciousness and ports of access to the collective unconscious, acknowledging the continuity of tradition, both deliberate and not, as well as how interpretations of some symbols, such as the swastika, have changed dramatically. With more than 300 unique woodcuts, drawings, calligraphy, and photographs--many never before reproduced--Pennick examines ancient and enduring glyphs in detail, such as the circle, cross, eye, pentagram, fleur de lis, tree of life, and horseshoe, as well as several families of symbols, such as craftsmen’s marks, runes, symbolic beasts, human heads and skulls, and the sigils of Mammon. The author explains the multiple forms and uses of each from ancient times to the present day, reflecting their roots in the Western Mystery tradition. He explores the symbols of high magic such as the glyph of John Dee’s monad, those of folk magic such as the traditional cock on the weather vane, and the creation of modern glyphs such as the peace sign and the anarchy symbol. Contrasting the hi-jacked use of power symbols in modern advertising with the vital role of symbols in traditional arts and crafts, Pennick reveals how symbols link the cosmic with the terrestrial and allow us to infuse the mundane with the numinous.
£10.79
University of Minnesota Press The Radical Bookstore: Counterspace for Social Movements
Examines how radical bookstores and similar spaces serve as launching pads for social movements How does social change happen? It requires an identified problem, an impassioned and committed group, a catalyst, and a plan. In this deeply researched consideration of seventy-seven stores and establishments, Kimberley Kinder argues that activists also need autonomous space for organizing, and that these spaces are made, not found. She explores the remarkably enduring presence of radical bookstores in America and how they provide infrastructure for organizing—gathering places, retail offerings that draw new people into what she calls “counterspaces.”Kinder focuses on brick-and-mortar venues where owners approach their businesses primarily as social movement tools. These may be bookstores, infoshops, libraries, knowledge cafes, community centers, publishing collectives, thrift stores, or art installations. They are run by activist-entrepreneurs who create centers for organizing and selling books to pay the rent. These spaces allow radical and contentious ideas to be explored and percolate through to actual social movements, and serve as crucibles for activists to challenge capitalism, imperialism, white privilege, patriarchy, and homophobia. They also exist within a central paradox: participating in the marketplace creates tensions, contradictions, and shortfalls. Activist retail does not end capitalism; collective ownership does not enable a retreat from civic requirements like zoning; and donations, no matter how generous, do not offset the enormous power of corporations and governments. In this timely and relevant book, Kinder presents a necessary, novel, and apt analysis of the role these retail spaces play in radical organizing, one that demonstrates how such durable hubs manage to persist, often for decades, between the spikes of public protest.
£90.00
University of Pennsylvania Press A Home Away from Home: Mutual Aid, Political Activism, and Caribbean American Identity
A Home Away from Home examines the significance of Caribbean American mutual aid societies and benevolent associations to the immigrant experience, particularly their implications for the formation of a Pan-Caribbean American identity and Black diasporic politics. At the turn of the twentieth century, New York City exploded with the establishment of mutual aid societies and benevolent associations. Caribbean immigrants, especially women, eager to find their place in a bustling new world, created these organizations, including the West Indian Benevolent Association of New York City, founded in 1884. They served as forums for discussions on Caribbean American affairs, hosted cultural activities, and provided newly arrived immigrants with various forms of support, including job and housing assistance, rotating lines of credit, help in the naturalization process, and its most popular function—sickness and burial assistance. In examining the number of these organizations, their membership, and the functions they served, Tyesha Maddox argues that mutual aid societies not only fostered a collective West Indian ethnic identity among immigrants from specific islands, but also strengthened kinship networks with those back home in the Caribbean. Especially important to these processes were Caribbean women such as Elizabeth Hendrickson, co-founder of the American West Indian Ladies’ Aid Society in 1915 and the Harlem Tenants’ League in 1928. Immigrant involvement in mutual aid societies also strengthened the belief that their own fate was closely intertwined with the social, economic, and political welfare of the Black international community. A Home Away from Home demonstrates how Caribbean American mutual aid societies and benevolent associations in many ways became proto-Pan-Africanist organizations.
£36.00
New York University Press Cosmopolitanisms
An indispensable collection that re-examines what it means to belong in the world. "Where are you from?" The word cosmopolitan was first used as a way of evading exactly this question, when Diogenes the Cynic declared himself a “kosmo-polites,” or citizen of the world. Cosmopolitanism displays two impulses—on the one hand, a detachment from one’s place of origin, while on the other, an assertion of membership in some larger, more compelling collective. Cosmopolitanisms works from the premise that there is more than one kind of cosmopolitanism, a plurality that insists cosmopolitanism can no longer stand as a single ideal against which all smaller loyalties and forms of belonging are judged. Rather, cosmopolitanism can be defined as one of many possible modes of life, thought, and sensibility that are produced when commitments and loyalties are multiple and overlapping. Featuring essays by major thinkers, including Homi Bhabha, Jean Bethke Elshtain, Thomas Bender, Leela Gandhi, Ato Quayson, and David Hollinger, among others, this collection asks what these plural cosmopolitanisms have in common, and how the cosmopolitanisms of the underprivileged might serve the ethical values and political causes that matter to their members. In addition to exploring the philosophy of Kant and the space of the city, this volume focuses on global justice, which asks what cosmopolitanism is good for, and on the global south, which has often been assumed to be an object of cosmopolitan scrutiny, not itself a source or origin of cosmopolitanism. This book gives a new meaning to belonging and its ground-breaking arguments call for deep and necessary discussion and discourse.
£24.99
New York University Press The Digital Edge: How Black and Latino Youth Navigate Digital Inequality
How black and Latino youth learn, create, and collaborate online The Digital Edge examines how the digital and social-media lives of low-income youth, especially youth of color, have evolved amidst rapid social and technological change. While notions of the digital divide between the “technology rich” and the “technology poor” have largely focused on access to new media technologies, the contours of the digital divide have grown increasingly complex. Analyzing data from a year‐long ethnographic study at Freeway High School, the authors investigate how the digital media ecologies and practices of black and Latino youth have adapted as a result of the wider diffusion of the internet all around us--in homes, at school, and in the palm of our hands. Their eager adoption of different technologies forge new possibilities for learning and creating that recognize the collective power of youth: peer networks, inventive uses of technology, and impassioned interests that are remaking the digital world. Relying on nearly three hundred in-depth interviews with students, teachers, and parents, and hundreds of hours of observation in technology classes and after school programs, The Digital Edge carefully documents some of the emergent challenges for creating a more equitable digital and educational future. Focusing on the complex interactions between race, class, gender, geography and social inequality, the book explores the educational perils and possibilities of the expansion of digital media into the lives and learning environments of low-income youth. Ultimately, the book addresses how schools can support the ability of students to develop the social, technological, and educational skills required to navigate twenty-first century life.
£23.99
New York University Press The New Heretics: Skepticism, Secularism, and Progressive Christianity
Charts the development of progressive Christianity’s engagement with modern science, historical criticism, and liberal humanism Christians who have doubts about the existence of God? Who do not believe in the divinity of Jesus? Who reject the accuracy of the Bible? The New Heretics explores the development of progressive Christianity, a movement of Christians who do not reject their identity as Christians, but who believe Christianity must be updated for today’s times and take into consideration modern science, historical criticism, and liberal humanism. Drawing on three years of ethnographic fieldwork in North America, Rebekka King focuses on testimonies of deconversion, collective reading practices, and the ways in which religious beliefs and practices are adapted to fit secular lives. King introduces the concept of “lived secularity” as a category with which to examine the ways in which religiosity often is entangled with and subsumed by secular identities over and against religious ones. This theoretical framework provides insight into the study of religious and cultural hybridity, new emerging groups such as “the nones,” atheism, religious apostasy, and multi-religious identities. The New Heretics pays close attention to the ways that progressive Christians understand themselves vis-à-vis a conservative or fundamentalist Christian “other,” providing context concerning the presumed divide between the religious right and the religious left. King shows that while it might be tempting to think of progressive Christians as atheists, there are religious and moral dimensions to their disbelief. For progressive Christians the act of questioning and rejecting God—alongside other theological tenets—is framed as a moral activity. Ultimately, the book showcases the importance of engaging with the ethics of belief in understanding contemporary Christianity.
£66.60
Johns Hopkins University Press The Russian Revolutionary Emigres, 1825-1870
Originally published in 1986. Martin A. Miller, author of the definitive biography of the exiled revolutionary Peter Kropotkin, traces the history of the first generations of Russians who went to Western Europe to devote their lives to anti-tsarist politics. Refusing to assimilate abroad and unable to return home, the émigrés political orientations were influenced by intellectual and social currents in both Russia and Europe. Miller undertakes a major reassessment of the émigré contribution to the Russian revolutionary movement. Starting with Nikolai Turgenev, who in 1825 was declared the first "émigré" by a special act of the Russian government, the exiles formed a unique social and political group. Miller takes a biographical approach in tracing the progression from a disparate community of intellectuals, unable to act together to promote their own program for change, to a more cohesive second émigré generation that provided the foundation for collective action and the development of a revolutionary ideology. The creation of the Russian émigré press, Miller argues, gave identity and momentum to the émigrés and helped promote their program of revolution and a new social order. The Russian Revolutionary Emigres, 1825-1870 concludes with the death in 1870 of the leading émigré figure, Alexander Herzen, and with an analysis of the impact upon the émigrés of the emergence of the populist revolutionary movement within Russia. The émigrés overcame the loss of their homeland through their version of a future Russia, one transformed into a new society where their ideals could be realized. When, two generations later, Lenin returned to Russia after decades in Europe and made this vision a reality, his actions built on the foundation laid by his nineteenth-century predecessors.
£39.00
Duke University Press Ugly Stories of the Peruvian Agrarian Reform
Ugly Stories of the Peruvian Agrarian Reform reveals the human drama behind the radical agrarian reform that unfolded in Peru during the final three decades of the twentieth century. That process began in 1969, when the left-leaning military government implemented a drastic program of land expropriation. Seized lands were turned into worker-managed cooperatives. After those cooperatives began to falter and the country returned to civilian rule in the 1980s, members distributed the land among themselves. In 1995–96, as the agrarian reform process was winding down and neoliberal policies were undoing leftist reforms, the Peruvian anthropologist Enrique Mayer traveled throughout the country, interviewing people who had lived through the most tumultuous years of agrarian reform, recording their memories and their stories. While agrarian reform caused enormous upheaval, controversy, and disappointment, it did succeed in breaking up the unjust and oppressive hacienda system. Mayer contends that the demise of that system is as important as the liberation of slaves in the Americas.Mayer interviewed ex-landlords, land expropriators, politicians, government bureaucrats, intellectuals, peasant leaders, activists, ranchers, members of farming families, and others. Weaving their impassioned recollections with his own commentary, he offers a series of dramatic narratives, each one centered around a specific instance of land expropriation, collective enterprise, and disillusion. Although the reform began with high hopes, it was quickly complicated by difficulties including corruption, rural and urban unrest, fights over land, and delays in modernization. As he provides insight into how important historical events are remembered, Mayer re-evaluates Peru’s military government (1969–79), its audacious agrarian reform program, and what that reform meant to Peruvians from all walks of life.
£27.99
University of Minnesota Press Juárez Girls Rising: Transformative Education in Times of Dystopia
Working-class girls in Ciudad Juárez grow up in a context marked by violence against women, the devastating effects of drug cartel wars, unresponsive and abusive authorities, and predatory U.S. capitalism: under constantly precarious conditions, these girls are often struggling to shape their lives and realize their aspirations. Juárez native Claudia G. Cervantes-Soon explores the vital role that transformative secondary education can play in promoting self-empowerment and a spirit of resistance to the violence and social injustice these girls encounter.Bringing together the voices of ten female students at Preparatoria Altavista, an innovative urban high school founded in 1968 on social justice principles, Cervantes-Soon offers a nuanced analysis of how students and their teachers together enact a transformative educational philosophy that promotes learning, self-authorship, and hope. Altavista’s curriculum is guided by the concept of autogestión, a holistic and dialectical approach to individual and collective identity formation rooted in the students’ experiences and a critical understanding of their social realities. Through its sensitive ethnography, this book shows how female students actively construct their own meaning of autogestión by making choices that they consider liberating and empowering.Juárez Girls Rising provides an alternative narrative to popular and often simplistic, sensationalizing, and stigmatizing discourses about those living in this urban borderland. By merging the story of Preparatoria Altavista with the voices of its students, this singular book provides a window into the possibilities and complexities of coming of age during a dystopic era in which youth hold on to their critical hope and cultivate their wisdom even as the options for the future appear to crumble before their eyes.
£20.99
University of Minnesota Press Drawing on Art: Duchamp and Company
Marcel Duchamp’s 1919 readymade, L.H.O.O.Q., which he created by drawing a moustache and goatee on a commercial reproduction of the Mona Lisa, precipitated a radical reevaluation of the meaning of art, the process of art making, and the role of the artist. In Drawing on Art, Dalia Judovitz explores the central importance of appropriation, collaboration, influence, and play in Duchamp’s work—and in Dada and Surrealist art more broadly—to show how the concept of art itself became the critical fuel and springboard for questioning art’s fundamental premises. Judovitz argues that rather than simply negating art, Duchamp’s readymades and later works, including films and conceptual pieces, demonstrate the impossibility of defining art in the first place. Through his readymades, for instance, Duchamp explicitly critiqued the commodification of art and inaugurated a profound shift from valuing art for its visual appearance to understanding the significance of its mode of public presentation. And if Duchamp literally drew on art, he also did so figuratively, thus raising questions of creativity and artistic influence. Equally destabilizing, Judovitz writes, was Duchamp’s idea that viewers actively participate in the creation of the art they are viewing. In addition to close readings ranging across Duchamp’s oeuvre, even his neglected works on chess, Judovitz provides interpretations of works by other figures who affected Duchamp’s thinking and collaborated with him, notably Francis Picabia, Man Ray, and Salvador Dalí, as well as artists who later appropriated and redeployed these gestures, such as Enrico Baj, Gordon Matta-Clark, and Richard Wilson. As Judovitz makes clear, these associations become paradigmatic of a new, collective way of thinking about artistic production that decisively overturns the myth of artistic genius.
£19.99
Cornell University Press The Era of the Witness
What is the role of survivor testimony in Holocaust remembrance? Today such recollections are considered among the most compelling and important historical sources we have, but this has not always been true. In The Era of the Witness, a concise, rigorously argued, and provocative work of cultural and intellectual history, Annette Wieviorka seeks to answer this surpassingly complex question. She analyzes the conditions under which survivor testimonies have been produced, how they have been received over time, and how the testimonies shaped the construction of history and collective memory. Wieviorka discerns three successive phases in the evolution of the roles and images of the Holocaust witness. The first phase is marked by the testimony left by those who did not survive the Holocaust but managed nevertheless to record their experiences. The second, most important, phase is centered on the Eichmann trial, which for Wieviorka is the moment (1961–1962) when a broad cultural deafness to survivors' stories was replaced by the image of the witness as "bearer of history." The author follows the changing nature of the witness into a third phase, which she calls "the era of the witness." Especially concerned with the pedagogical and political uses to which survivor testimony has been put, Wieviorka examines factors that determine when and how survivor testimonies are incorporated into the larger narrative of the Holocaust, according it a privileged place in our understanding. By exploring the ways in which the Holocaust is remembered, The Era of the Witness also deepens our understanding of how testimony can help to define not only twentieth-century history but also more recent episodes of mass killing that are only now "becoming history."
£21.99
John Wiley and Sons Ltd Politics of Affect
'The capacity to affect and to be affected'. This simple definition opens a world of questions - by indicating an openness to the world. To affect and to be affected is to be in encounter, and to be in encounter is to have already ventured forth. Adventure: far from being enclosed in the interiority of a subject, affect concerns an immediate participation in the events of the world. It is about intensities of experience. What is politics made of, if not adventures of encounter? What are encounters, if not adventures of relation? The moment we begin to speak of affect, we are already venturing into the political dimension of relational encounter. This is the dimension of experience in-the-making. This is the level at which politics is emergent. In these wide-ranging interviews, Brian Massumi explores this emergent politics of affect, weaving between philosophy, political theory and everyday life. The discussions wend their way 'transversally': passing between the tired oppositions which too often encumber thought, such as subject/object, body/mind and nature/culture. New concepts are gradually introduced to remap the complexity of relation and encounter for a politics of emergence: 'differential affective attunement', 'collective individuation', 'micropolitics', 'thinking-feeling', 'ontopower', 'immanent critique'. These concepts are not offered as definitive solutions. Rather, they are designed to move the inquiry still further, for an ongoing exploration of the political problems posed by affect. Politics of Affect offers an accessible entry-point into the work of one of the defining figures of the last quarter century, as well as opening up new avenues for philosophical reflection and political engagement.
£55.00
John Wiley and Sons Ltd In Search of Politics
We live in a world which no longer questions itself, which lives from one day to another managing successive crises and struggling to brace itself for new ones, without knowing where it is going and without trying to plan the itinerary. And everything important in our lives - livelihood, human bonds, partnerships, neighbourhood, goals worth pursuing and dangers to avoid - feels transient, precarious, vulnerable, insecure, uncertain, risky. Is there a connection between the shape of the world we inhabit and the way we live our lives? Exploring that connection, and finding out just how close it is, is the main concern of this book. What is at stake in this inquiry is the possibility of re-building the"'private/public" space, where private troubles and public issues meet and where citizens engage in dialogue in order to govern themselves. Individual liberty can only be a product of collective work, it can only be collectively secured and guaranteed. And yet today we are moving towards a privatization of the means to secure individual liberty. If seen as a therapy for the present ills, this is bound to produce effects of a most sinister kind. The act of translating private troubles into public issues is in danger of falling into disuse and being forgotten. The argument of this book is that making the translation possible again is an urgent and vital imperative for the renewal of politics today. This new book by Zygmunt Bauman - one of the most original and creative thinkers of our time - will be of particular interest to students of sociology, politics and social and political theory.
£50.00
Princeton University Press Core and Equilibria of a Large Economy. (PSME-5)
Can every allocation in the core of an economy be decentralized by a suitably chosen price system? Werner Hildenbrand shows that the answer is yes if the economy has "many" participating agents and if the influence of every individual agent on collective actions is "negligible." To give a general and precise definition of economics with this property he considers both economies with a continuum of agents, and a sequence of economies with an increasing number of participants. In both cases this leads to a measure theoretic formulation of economic equilibrium analysis. In the first part of the book the relevant mathematics is developed. In the second part the continuity and convexity properties of the total demand of a consumption sector are investigated. An important result is the equivalence between the core and the set of Walras equilibria for an exchange economy with a continuum of agents. The author then deals with limit theorems on the core for purely competitive sequences of exchange economies. In the last chapter the core and the set of Walras equilibria for a coalition production economy and the relation between these two equilibrium concepts are studied. Originally published in 1974. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
£36.00
Princeton University Press Cultivating Conscience: How Good Laws Make Good People
Contemporary law and public policy often treat human beings as selfish creatures who respond only to punishments and rewards. Yet every day we behave unselfishly--few of us mug the elderly or steal the paper from our neighbor's yard, and many of us go out of our way to help strangers. We nevertheless overlook our own good behavior and fixate on the bad things people do and how we can stop them. In this pathbreaking book, acclaimed law and economics scholar Lynn Stout argues that this focus neglects the crucial role our better impulses could play in society. Rather than lean on the power of greed to shape laws and human behavior, Stout contends that we should rely on the force of conscience. Stout makes the compelling case that conscience is neither a rare nor quirky phenomenon, but a vital force woven into our daily lives. Drawing from social psychology, behavioral economics, and evolutionary biology, Stout demonstrates how social cues--instructions from authorities, ideas about others' selfishness and unselfishness, and beliefs about benefits to others--have a powerful role in triggering unselfish behavior. Stout illustrates how our legal system can use these social cues to craft better laws that encourage more unselfish, ethical behavior in many realms, including politics and business. Stout also shows how our current emphasis on self-interest and incentives may have contributed to the catastrophic political missteps and financial scandals of recent memory by encouraging corrupt and selfish actions, and undermining society's collective moral compass. This book proves that if we care about effective laws and civilized society, the powers of conscience are simply too important for us to ignore.
£22.00
Princeton University Press Distant Proximities: Dynamics beyond Globalization
Has globalization the phenomenon outgrown "globalization" the concept? In Distant Proximities, one of America's senior scholars presents a work of sweeping vision that addresses the dizzying anxieties of the post-Cold War, post-September 11 world. Culminating the influential reassessment of international relations he began in 1990 with Turbulence in World Politics, James Rosenau here undertakes the first systematic analysis of just how complex these profound global changes have become. Among his many conceptual innovations, he treats people-in-the-street as well as activists and elites as central players in what we call "globalization." Deftly weaving striking insights into arresting prose, Rosenau traces the links and interactions between people at the individual level and institutions such as states, nongovernmental organizations, and transnational corporations at the collective level. In doing so he masterfully conveys how the emerging new reality has unfolded as events abroad increasingly pervade the routines of life at home and become, in effect, distant proximities. Rosenau begins by distinguishing among various local, global, and private "worlds" in terms of their inhabitants' orientations toward developments elsewhere. He then proceeds to cogently analyze how the residents of these worlds shape and are shaped by the diverse collectivities that crowd the global stage and that sustain such issues as human rights, corruption, the global economy, and global governance. Throughout this richly imaginative, fluidly written book, Rosenau examines how anti-globalization protests and the terrorist attacks on America amount to quintessential distant proximities. His book is thus a pathbreaking inquiry into the dynamics that lie beyond globalization, one that all thoughtful observers of the world scene will find penetrating and provocative.
£49.50
University of California Press Modern Mongolia: From Khans to Commissars to Capitalists
Land-locked between its giant neighbors, Russia and China, Mongolia was the first Asian country to adopt communism and the first to abandon it. When the Soviet Union collapsed in the early 1990s, Mongolia turned to international financial agencies - including the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the Asian Development Bank - for help in compensating for the economic changes caused by disruptions in the communist world. "Modern Mongolia" is the best-informed and most thorough account to date of the political economy of Mongolia during the past decade. In it, Morris Rossabi explores the effects of the withdrawal of Soviet assistance, the role of international financial agencies in supporting a pure market economy, and the ways that new policies have led to greater political freedom but also to unemployment, poverty, increasingly inequitable distribution of income, and deterioration in the education, health, and well-being of Mongolian society. Rossabi demonstrates that the agencies providing grants and loans insisted on Mongolia's adherence to a set of policies that did not generally take into account the country's unique heritage and society. Though the sale of state assets, minimalist government, liberalization of trade and prices, a balanced budget, and austerity were supposed to yield marked economic growth, Mongolia - the world's fifth-largest per capita recipient of foreign aid - did not recover as expected. As he details this painful transition from a collective to a capitalist economy, Rossabi also analyzes the cultural effects of the sudden opening of Mongolia to democracy. He looks at the broader implications of Mongolia's international situation and considers its future, particularly in relation to China.
£29.70
Taylor & Francis Ltd Nordic Approaches to Peace Operations: A New Model in the Making
A new examination of Nordic approaches to peace operations after the Cold War. It shows how the Nordic countries (Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden) remain relevant for the study and practice of post-Cold War peace operations.This unique study is structured around eleven success conditions derived from an analysis of the lessons learned since the early 1990s, ensuring that the results of the case studies are directly comparable. These case studies are supplemented by an analysis of Nordics’ collective efforts to replace their old Cold War peacekeeping model with a new one that meets the requirements of the new era. The overall conclusion is that the Nordics have succeeded in meeting the post-Cold War requirements for success, both individually and collectively, and that a new effective model is in the making. This book makes several important contributions to the literature on peace operations. First, it demolishes the widely held view that the Nordic countries remain a bastion of traditional Cold War peacekeeping with little relevance for contemporary operations. Second, it constitutes the first systematic overview of the reforms undertaken by the four Nordic countries since the end of the Cold War. Third, it fills a "historical" gap by providing a comprehensive analysis of the celebrated old Nordic Cold War model, explaining how and why it developed and how it functioned. Finally, the analytical framework is a general tool which can be used to evaluate the approaches to peace operations employed by countries around the world. This book will be of great interest to all students of peacekeeping, peace studies, security studies and IR in general.
£130.00
University of Texas Press Urban Latin America: The Political Condition from Above and Below
Much research on the city in developing societies has focused mainly on one of three areas—planning, demography, or economics—and has emphasized either power elites or the masses, but not both. The published literature on Latin America has reflected these interests and has so far failed to provide a comprehensive view of Latin American urbanization. Urban Latin America is an attempt to integrate research on Latin American social organization within a single theoretical framework: development as fundamentally a political problem. Alejandro Portes and John Walton have included material on both elites and marginal populations and on the three major areas of research in order to formulate and address some of the key questions about the structure of urban politics in Latin America. Following an introduction that delineates the scope of Latin American urban studies, Portes discusses the Latin American city as a creation of European colonialism. He goes on to examine political behavior among the poor, with central reference to system support and countersystem potential. Walton provides material for a comparative study of four cities: Monterrey and Guadalajara in Mexico and Medellín and Cali in Colombia. He also summarizes a large number of urban elite studies and develops a theoretical interpretation of their collective results, based on class structure and vertical integration. Material in each chapter is cross-referenced to other chapters, and the authors have used a common methodological approach in synthesizing and interpreting the research literature. In the final chapter they generalize current findings, elaborating on the interface between elite and mass politics in the urban situation. They make some observations on approaching changes and pinpoint possible research strategies for the future.
£19.99
Columbia University Press Sibling Action: The Genealogical Structure of Modernity
Beginning in the late eighteenth century, Europeans embarked on a new way of classifying the world, devising genealogies that determined degrees of relatedness by tracing heritage through common ancestry. This methodology organized historical systems into family trees, transforming the closest contemporaneous terms on trees of languages, religions, races, nations, species, or individuals into siblings. Encompassing political fraternity, sister languages, racial discourse on brotherhood, evolutionary sibling species, and intense, often incestuously inclined brother-sister bonds in literature, siblinghood stands out as a ubiquitous-yet unacknowledged-conceptual touchstone across the European long nineteenth century. In all such systems the sibling term, not-quite-same and not-quite-other, serves as an active fault line, necessary for and yet continuously destabilizing definition and classification. In her provocative book, Stefani Engelstein explores the pervasive significance of sibling structures and their essential role in the modern organization of knowledge and identity. Sibling Action argues that this relational paradigm came to structure the modern subject, life sciences, human sciences, and collective identities such as race, religion, and gender. Engelstein considers theoretical constructions of subjectivity through Sophocles' Antigone; fraternal equality and its exclusion of sisters in political rhetoric; the intertwining of economic and kinship theory by Friedrich Engels and Claude Levi-Strauss; Darwin and his contemporaries' accounts of speciation; anthropological and philological depictions of Muslims and Jews at the margins of Europe; and evolutionary psychology's theorizing around the incest taboo. Integrating close readings across the disciplines with panoramic intellectual history and arresting literary interpretations, Sibling Action presents a compelling new understanding of systems of knowledge and provides the foundation for less confrontational formulations of belonging, identity, and agency.
£55.80
The University of Chicago Press Forgetful of Their Sex: Female Sanctity and Society, ca. 500-1100
Despite religious claims of a spiritual egalitarianism in the heavenly kingdom, there was a definite tendency in the Middle Ages to organize the celestial realm according to the established customs, values, and hierarchy of earthly society. In this study of over 2500 female and male saints, Jane Schulenburg explores women's status and experience in early medieval society and in the Church. She focuses on the changing social contexts of female sanctity (women saints as embodiments of cultural models) as well as extravagant, "transgressive" or "deviant" female behaviour which frequently challenged male order and authority. She argues that between 500-1100 a clear gender-based asymmetry existed in the selection of saints, which became more exaggerated during certain eras. The title, "Forgetful of Their Sex," is taken from St Jerome's writings and refers to women's ability to deny or transcend the "natural frailty" of their sex, or to act in a "virile" or heroic manner. This study depicts the lives of these strong, creative, independent-minded women who achieved a visibility in their society which led to recognition of sanctity. She also examines some of the major contributing factors involved in establishing reputations for sanctity and the recruitment and promotion of saints, including family wealth and power, patronage, monasticism, virginity, motherhood, and longevity. Invaluable for what they tell us about early medieval society and the Church, the lives of these early saints also afford rare insight into the private world of medieval men and women, the special bonds of family and friendship, and the collective mentalities of the period. This book should constitute a major contribution to the study of medieval history, gender and religion.
£40.00
The University of Chicago Press Sovereignty and the Sacred: Secularism and the Political Economy of Religion
Sovereignty and the Sacred challenges contemporary models of polity and economy through a two-step engagement with the history of religions. Beginning with the recognition of the convergence in the history of European political theology between the sacred and the sovereign as creating “states of exception”—that is, moments of rupture in the normative order that, by transcending this order, are capable of re-founding or remaking it—Robert A. Yelle identifies our secular, capitalist system as an attempt to exclude such moments by subordinating them to the calculability of laws and markets. The second step marshals evidence from history and anthropology that helps us to recognize the contribution of such states of exception to ethical life, as a means of release from the legal or economic order. Yelle draws on evidence from the Hebrew Bible to English deism, and from the Aztecs to ancient India, to develop a theory of polity that finds a place and a purpose for those aspects of religion that are often marginalized and dismissed as irrational by Enlightenment liberalism and utilitarianism.Developing this close analogy between two elemental domains of society, Sovereignty and the Sacred offers a new theory of religion while suggesting alternative ways of organizing our political and economic life. By rethinking the transcendent foundations and liberating potential of both religion and politics, Yelle points to more hopeful and ethical modes of collective life based on egalitarianism and popular sovereignty. Deliberately countering the narrowness of currently dominant economic, political, and legal theories, he demonstrates the potential of a revived history of religions to contribute to a rethinking of the foundations of our political and social order.
£28.78
Archaeopress (Not) All Roads Lead to Rome: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Mobility in the Ancient World
(Not) All Roads Lead to Rome is the result of the highly engaging debate within the “Annual Meeting of Postgraduates in Ancient History”, a yearly congress of young graduates and researchers held in April 2022 in the University of Barcelona. In this volume, the issue of mobility in Antiquity in its broadest sense is approached from a multidisciplinary perspective. One of the main objectives is, also, to give promising young scholars (postgraduates and PHD students) the opportunity to publish their early research on mobility and build a cohesive but thematically broad work. Although mobility is always present in studies of exchange and cultural diffusion, in this case it becomes the main subject of this collective research effort. We aim to encourage academic discussion around mobility as a key feature of societies, inherent to their functioning and where cultural, social and economic processes meet. The Mediterranean, and the Roman Empire by extension, is a dynamic area, and thus, it allows us to study mobility from many perspectives. In this volume, the movement of ideas, be they ideological or religious, is explored as it relates to underlying social and economic patterns. Likewise, the physical mobility of people across empires or within settlements is treated as a consequence of and a way to ease social relations. Social mobility too is discussed in the broader framework of socioeconomic dynamics, with case studies ranging from Egypt to Rome. Finally, the movement of goods (trade) is also part of this volume, as it was essential at bolstering interconnectivity in the Mediterranean. In that regard, archaeology holds the largest potential to provide new data regarding mobility of products, and thus long-distance contact and exchange.
£69.92
Sidestone Press Death Revisited: The excavation of three Bronze Age barrows and surrounding landscape at Apeldoorn-Wieselseweg
This book presents a group of small and inconspicuous barrows that were recently discovered in the forest of Apeldoorn, the Netherlands. They are part of an extensive barrow landscape of which little was yet known. Fieldwork carried out in and around them yielded a wealth of new data. It was discovered that even the most inconspicuous and heavily damaged mound of this group still contained many special features.This special place was anchored around a site that probably had a particular significance in the Late Neolithic, and where special rituals were carried out during the Bronze Age, resulting in the construction of an enigmatic row of pits – rituals the likes of which have not previously been attested around barrows in the Netherlands, but which are known elsewhere in Europe. The dead were buried at locations that were probably only later covered by monuments. During the Bronze Age (between the 18th and 15th centuries BC) the mounds of this small barrow group were used as collective graves for what was probably perceived as one specific ‘community of ancestors’.The burial practices in the mounds show strong similarities and it is argued that these barrows were each other’s successors, representing the funeral history of people who wished to unite their forebears in death as one unproblematic whole without distinctions. The fieldwork showed that even small-scale, partial excavations of a seemingly minor barrow group can inform us on the significance of the extensive barrow landscapes they are part of – a knowledge that can help us to understand the prehistoric legacy of the Netherlands and to protect it for the future as heritage.
£48.28
Archaeopress Arqueología de las sociedades locales en la Alta Edad Media: San Julián de Aistra y las residencias de las élites rurales
Arqueología de las sociedades locales en la Alta Edad Media: San Julián de Aistra y las residencias de las élites rurales presents the main results obtained in the archaeological project of San Julián de Aistra (Zalduondo-Araia, Álava) carried out between 2006 and 2020 by University College London and the University of the Basque Country. The remains of a hermitage dedicated to Santa Julián and Santa Basilisa, built in the 10th century and renovated in the Romanesque period and in the 18th century, are preserved in the deserted village of Aistra, which is documented since the 11th century. Excavation has shown that the site was occupied in prehistoric, Roman and medieval times. While prehistoric and Roman materials have been recovered in secondary contexts, four medieval phases of a domestic, productive, and funerary nature have been defined. One of the most important results of the project has been the discovery of residential spaces of elites who exercised territorial dominion throughout the Early Middle Ages. In the 14th century, the place was depopulated and, since then, the Aistra area has been managed and disputed by the nearby villages of Zalduondo and Araia, which created a community aimed at jointly managing the resources and spaces of Aistra. This community, active between the 14th and 20th centuries, broke up from the 19th century onwards, when individual management of resources became accentuated, and the commons were divided up. This collective volume brings together a large number of specialized studies and provides an interpretation of the site of Aistra in terms of socio-political practices that define the main characteristics of early medieval local societies in the northwest of the Iberian Peninsula.
£85.00
Lund Humphries Publishers Ltd Ori Gersht: History Repeating
The first comprehensive survey of the photographs, films, and videos of Ori Gersht, this richly illustrated book presents the best of Gersht's achingly beautiful work and explores how he intertwines spectacles of painterly and narrative imagery with personal and collective memory, metaphysical journeys, contextualized spaces, and the history of art and photography. Pushing the camera to the limits of what it can record, Gersht engages an aesthetic that reflects both a highly researched and instinctive approach to his chosen media. Be it the scars left on the sunlit yet war-torn interiors of buildings in Sarajevo, the white noise of a modern-day train journey to Auschwitz, or the clearing of trees in a forest that once stood witness to mass murder in the Ukraine, Gersht's vision bridges a history that is full of violent horror and a world of emergent, transcendent beauty. Ori Gersht was born in Israel in 1967 and is currently based in London. A conduit between the past and present, his large-scale photographs and videos wed old masters to new technologies, quoting from such sources as Spanish and Dutch still- life painting and the Hudson River Valley School. Gersht's interest in history also goes beyond the visual arts, encompassing the political history that has shaped his personal identity and that of all of us scarred by violence in our contemporary world. His work has been acquired and commissioned by major art institutions such as the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Tate, London, the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, and the Victoria and Albert Museum.
£49.50
The New Press Prosecution of an Insurrection: The Complete Trial Transcript of the Second Impeachment of Donald Trump
The complete riveting transcript of the historic case against the president for igniting the January 6 siege of the Capitol Prosecution of an Insurrection is the complete, riveting transcript of the historic case against President Donald J. Trump for igniting the January 6 siege of the Capitol. Following the norm-shattering attempt by his followers to disrupt the peaceful transfer of power, the second impeachment trial of the president seared a new lexicon into our collective consciousness and marked a watershed moment in American history. The case, presented to the Senate by impeachment managers from the House, marked a bravura performance by members of Congress who were themselves the targets of the rioters incited by the president only days earlier. Citizens disturbed by the events of January 2021 and Republican attempts to rewrite history will find in these pages the most authoritative record of one of our democracy’s darkest hours, including: • The official articles of impeachment against the president for incitement of an insurrection • The response of President Trump to the articles of impeachment, on behalf of the House defense lawyers • The complete trial transcript, including the full text of the arguments made by the House representatives and the full text of the president’s defense • Headshots from the trial of all nine House impeachment managers in action, including lead manager Representative Jamie Raskin, as well as all three House defense lawyers • Photographs, timelines, and screenshots of tweets entered as evidence, as well as stills from the videos presented Prosecution of an Insurrection preserves for posterity an episode that ranks with the McCarthy hearings, Watergate, and the Iran-Contra investigation for its importance in American political history.
£12.99
The Merlin Press Ltd In and Out of Crisis: The Global Financial Meltdown and Left Alternatives
Investment banks have disappeared overnight, industrial firms have gone bankrupt, and the financial order has been shaken to the core: our world is in the grips of the most calamitous economic crisis since the Great Depression with its epicentre is the imperial USA. Many around may wonder if another world is possible, but few are mapping out potential avenues - and flagging wrong turns - en route to a post-capitalist future. In this groundbreaking analysis, renowned radical political economists Albo, Gindin and Panitch lay bare the roots of the crisis, which they locate in the dynamic expansion of capital on a global scale over the last quarter century - and in the inner logic of capitalism itself. In and Out of Crisis challenges the call by much of the Left for a return to a mythical Golden Age of economic regulation as a check on finance capital and shows how neo-liberal free markets have been sustained by massive state intervention. With clarity and erudition, they argue that given the balance of social forces regulation is not a means of fundamentally reordering power in society, but rather a way of preserving markets. Contrary to those who believe US hegemony is on the wane, Albo, Gindin and Panitch contend that the meltdown has, in fact, reinforced the centrality of the American state as the dominant force within global capitalism, while simultaneously increasing the difficulties entailed in managing its imperial role. In conclusion, the authors argue that it's time to start thinking about genuinely transformative alternatives to capitalism - and how to build the collective capacity to get us there. We should be thinking bigger and preparing to go further.
£13.95
Metropolitan Museum of Art Gerhard Richter: Painting After All
A lavishly illustrated monograph that spans the entire career of Gerhard Richter, one of the most celebrated contemporary artists "Spans the contemporary German artist's six-decade career. . . . [A] stirring exhibition in [its] own right."—New York Times"[A] weighty catalogue... illuminat[es] some less-visited corners of Richter's oeuvre."—New York Review of Books Over the course of his acclaimed 60-year career, Gerhard Richter (b. 1932) has employed both representation and abstraction as a means of reckoning with the legacy, collective memory, and national sensibility of post–Second World War Germany, in both broad and very personal terms. This handsomely designed book features approximately 100 of his key canvases, from photo paintings created in the early 1960s to portraits and later large-scale abstract series, as well as select works in glass. New essays by eminent scholars address a variety of themes: Sheena Wagstaff evaluates the conceptual import of the artist’s technique; Benjamin H. D. Buchloh discusses the poignant Birkenau paintings (2014); Peter Geimer explores the artist’s enduring interest in photographic imagery; Briony Fer looks at Richter’s family pictures against traditional painting genres and conventions; Brinda Kumar investigates the artist’s engagement with landscape as a site of memory; André Rottmann considers the impact of randomization and chance on Richter’s abstract works; and Hal Foster examines the glass and mirror works. As this book demonstrates, Richter’s rich and varied oeuvre is a testament to the continued relevance of painting in contemporary art.Published by The Metropolitan Museum of Art/Distributed by Yale University PressExhibition Schedule:The Met Breuer, New York (March 4–July 5, 2020)Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (August 14, 2020–January 19, 2021)
£35.00
Duke University Press Feminism without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity
Bringing together classic and new writings of the trailblazing feminist theorist Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Feminism without Borders addresses some of the most pressing and complex issues facing contemporary feminism. Forging vital links between daily life and collective action and between theory and pedagogy, Mohanty has been at the vanguard of Third World and international feminist thought and activism for nearly two decades. This collection highlights the concerns running throughout her pioneering work: the politics of difference and solidarity, decolonizing and democratizing feminist practice, the crossing of borders, and the relation of feminist knowledge and scholarship to organizing and social movements. Mohanty offers here a sustained critique of globalization and urges a reorientation of transnational feminist practice toward anticapitalist struggles.Feminism without Borders opens with Mohanty's influential critique of western feminism ("Under Western Eyes") and closes with a reconsideration of that piece based on her latest thinking regarding the ways that gender matters in the racial, class, and national formations of globalization. In between these essays, Mohanty meditates on the lives of women workers at different ends of the global assembly line (in India, the United Kingdom, and the United States); feminist writing on experience, identity, and community; dominant conceptions of multiculturalism and citizenship; and the corporatization of the North American academy. She considers the evolution of interdisciplinary programs like Women's Studies and Race and Ethnic Studies; pedagogies of accommodation and dissent; and transnational women's movements for grassroots ecological solutions and consumer, health, and reproductive rights. Mohanty's probing and provocative analyses of key concepts in feminist thought—"home," "sisterhood," "experience," "community"—lead the way toward a feminism without borders, a feminism fully engaged with the realities of a transnational world.
£22.99
Princeton University Press Words and Distinctions for the Common Good: Practical Reason in the Logic of Social Science
How social scientists' disagreements about their key words and distinctions have been misconceived, and what to do about itSocial scientists do research on a variety of topics—gender, capitalism, populism, and race and ethnicity, among others. They make descriptive and explanatory claims about empathy, intelligence, neoliberalism, and power. They advise policymakers on diversity, digitalization, work, and religion. And yet, as Gabriel Abend points out in this provocative book, they can’t agree on what these things are and how to identify them. How to tell if something is a religion or a cult or a sect? What is empathy? What makes this society a capitalist one? Disputes of this sort arise again and again in the social sciences.Abend argues that these disagreements have been doubly misconceived. First, they conflate two questions: how a social science community should use its most important words, and what distinctions it should accept and work with. Second, there’s no fact of the matter about either. Instead, they’re practical reason questions for a community, which aim at epistemically and morally good outcomes. Abend calls on social science communities to work together on their words, distinctions, and classifications. They must make collective decisions about the uses of words, the acceptability of distinctions, and the criteria for assessing both. These decisions aren’t up to individual scholars; the community gets the last word. According to Abend, the common good, justice, and equality should play a significant role in the logic of scientific research.Gabriel Abend is professor of sociology at University of Lucerne and the author of The Moral Background: An Inquiry into the History of Business Ethics (Princeton).
£31.50
Penguin Books Ltd Bring No Clothes: Bloomsbury and the Philosophy of Fashion
'He makes us see a subject we thought we knew so well from a completely different angle; in writing that is deeply researched, but inviting, warm, and full of personality' Katy Hessel 'Charlie Porter is a magician' Olivia LaingWhy do we wear what we wear? To answer this question, we must go back and unlock the wardrobes of the early twentieth century, when fashion as we know it was born.In Bring No Clothes, acclaimed fashion writer Charlie Porter brings us face to face with six members of the Bloomsbury Group, the collective of artists and thinkers who were in the vanguard of a social and sartorial revolution. Each of them offers fresh insight into the constraints and possibilities of fashion today: from the stifling repression of E. M. Forster's top buttons to the creativity of Vanessa Bell's wayward hems; from the sheer pleasure of Ottoline Morrell's lavish dresses to the clashing self-consciousness of Virginia Woolf's orange stockings. As Porter carefully unpicks what they wore and how they wore it, we see how clothing can be a means of artistic, intellectual and sexual liberation, or, conversely, a tool for patriarchal control.Travelling through libraries, archives, attics and studios, Porter uncovers fresh evidence about his subjects, revealing them in a thrillingly intimate, vivid new light. And, as he is inspired to begin making his own clothing, his perspective on fashion - and on life - starts to change. In the end, he shows, we should all 'bring no clothes,' embracing a new philosophy of living: one which activates the connections between the way we dress and the way we think, act and love.
£18.00
HarperCollins Publishers The Intention Experiment: Use Your Thoughts to Change the World
Ever wondered if your intentions, prayers or wishes have a real, calculable effect on the world? Here, from Lynne McTaggart, groundbreaking author of ‘The Field’, comes riveting accounts of scientific investigations and real case histories with evidence that we are all connected and our intentions can be harnessed as a collective force for good. For the last 40 years renegade scientists, experimenting with the limits of quantum physics, have made seemingly impossible discoveries. 1966: a lie-detector expert accidentally discovers that plants can read thoughts. 1982: meditating Buddhist monks in the Himalayas turn their bodies into a human furnace. 1994: a psychologist's experiments reveal a stream of light flowing from healers during healing. These events form part of an extraordinary scientific story and revolutionary discovery - that thought is a thing that affects other things. In The Intention Experiment, Lynne McTaggart, author of the international bestseller The Field, joins forces with a team of international, renowned scientists to test the effects of focused group intention on scientifically quantifiable targets - animal, plant and human. The Intention Experiment is a truly revolutionary book that invites you, the reader, to take part in the greatest intention experiment in history. The results of McTaggart's 'global laboratory' started with the focused intention that made a geranium leaf glow to evidence to show that group intention is powerful enough to affect targets more than 5000 miles away and may even affect global warming. These remarkable results prove human thought and intention has the power to focus our lives, heal our illnesses, clean up our communities and improve the planet. This book also shows you how to harness that power to make changes in your own life.
£10.99
John Wiley and Sons Ltd Resonance: A Sociology of Our Relationship to the World
The pace of modern life is undoubtedly speeding up, yet this acceleration does not seem to have made us any happier or more content. If acceleration is the problem, then the solution, argues Hartmut Rosa in this major new work, lies in “resonance.” The quality of a human life cannot be measured simply in terms of resources, options, and moments of happiness; instead, we must consider our relationship to, or resonance with, the world. Applying his theory of resonance to many domains of human activity, Rosa describes the full spectrum of ways in which we establish our relationship to the world, from the act of breathing to the adoption of culturally distinct worldviews. He then turns to the realms of concrete experience and action – family and politics, work and sports, religion and art – in which we as late modern subjects seek out resonance. This task is proving ever more difficult as modernity’s logic of escalation is both cause and consequence of a distorted relationship to the world, at individual and collective levels. As Rosa shows, all the great crises of modern society – the environmental crisis, the crisis of democracy, the psychological crisis – can also be understood and analyzed in terms of resonance and our broken relationship to the world around us. Building on his now classic work on acceleration, Rosa’s new book is a major new contribution to the theory of modernity, showing how our problematic relation to the world is at the crux of some of the most pressing issues we face today. This bold renewal of critical theory for our times will be of great interest to students and scholars across the social sciences and humanities.
£18.99
The University of Chicago Press Believing in South Central: Everyday Islam in the City of Angels
The area of Los Angeles known as South Central is often overshadowed by dismal stereotypes, problematic racial stigmas, and its status as the home to some of the city's poorest and most violent neighborhoods. Amid South Central's shifting demographics and its struggles with poverty, sociologist Pamela J. Prickett takes a closer look, focusing on the members of an African American Muslim community and exploring how they help each other combat poverty, job scarcity, violence, and racial injustice. Prickett's engaging ethnography relates how believers in this longstanding religious community see Islam as a way of life, a comprehensive blueprint for individual and collective action, guiding how to interact with others, conduct business, strive for progress, and cultivate faith. Prickett offers deep insights into the day-to-day lived religion of the Muslims who call this community home, showing how the mosque provides a system of social support and how believers deepen their spiritual practice not in spite of, but through, conditions of poverty. Prickett breaks past the stigmas of urban poverty, revealing a complex and vibrant community by telling the stories of longstanding residents of South Central--like Sister Ava, who offers food to the local unhoused people and finds the sacred in her extensive DVD collection. In addition to her portraits of everyday life among Muslims in South Central, Prickett also provides vivid and accessible descriptions of Ramadan and histories of the mosque, situates this community within the larger story of the Nation of Islam, explores gender issues, and unpacks the interaction between African American Muslims and South Asian and Arab American Muslims, revealing both the global and local significance of this religious tradition.
£20.05
Oxford University Press Catalonia: The Struggle Over Independence
Located in north eastern Spain, Catalonia has long displayed the attributes of a nation: distinct language and culture, separate social and political institutions, and a strong collective identity. At the same time, it is one of Spain's centres of economic dynamism and innovation. As such, it is an especially striking instance of what has come to be known as 'minority' or 'internal' nations within a larger political order. Even after the Franco dictatorship's systematic suppression of Catalan language and culture, the idea that the Catalan nation needed to have an independent state of its own remained at the margins of Catalan politics. Yet, in recent years Catalan independence has become: the formal objective of Catalonia's nationalist parties; the focus of a strongly mobilized social movement; and the primary option of as much as half of Catalonia's electorate. This drive to independence even led to a failed unilateral declaration of independence. How can this remarkable transformation best be explained and what does it portend for the future of Catalonia and Spain? This new edition seeks to answer these questions. At the same time, the book analyzes the proposal for an independent Catalan state while also showing how the Catalan question might be resolved within Spain, by creating a multinational federation. It also explains why there is little prospect of either project coming to pass. The book demonstrates the dangers and contradictions of a state nationalism that denies the very existence of internal nations, while also exploring the terms under which such nations can be accommodated within a larger political order. On this basis, it addresses a critical challenge to the political institutions of much of Europe and North America.
£29.49
Oxford University Press Inc Mercy: Humanity in Warfare
War presents the most degraded moral environment humanity creates. It is an arena where individuality is subsumed in collective violence and humanity is obscured as a faceless, merciless enemy pitted against its reflection in an elemental struggle for survival. A barbaric logic has guided the conduct of war throughout history. Yet as Cathal Nolan reveals in this gripping, poignant, and powerful book, even as war can obliterate hope and decency at the grand level it simultaneously produces conditions that permit astonishing exceptions of mercy and shared dignity. Pulling the trigger is usually both the expedient thing and required by war's grim and remorseless calculus. Yet somehow the trigger is not always pulled. A different choice is made. Restraint triumphs. Humanity is rediscovered and honored in a flash of recognition. This book gathers and explores acts of singular mercy, giving them form and substance—across wars, causes, and opposing uniforms. These acts demand our attention not only for the moral uplift they supply but because they challenge assumptions about humanity itself. Rising above ordinary courage, they may ultimately transcend our understanding, entering the realm of the ineffable. Nevertheless, as Nolan shows, acts of mercy in war are not the provenance of saints but of ordinary men and women who perform them at great personal risk. As much or more than the normal war hero stories, we must recognize the extraordinary courage of the merciful in war. Mercy is an exceptional book about exceptions, challenging myths and heroic fabrications, refuting claims to exclusive moral virtue. It reminds us that decency in warfare is also universal, offering a haunting and compellingly humane counternarrative to war's usual inhumane logic.
£27.49
Simon & Schuster Space Nomads: Set a Course for Mars: Chasing the Arts, Sciences, and Technology for Human Transformation
Transform Your Mind. Expand Your Universe. Reach for Mars. Imagine a better tomorrow with interstellar essays and art—drawing on the aspirational futurism that fuels Star Trek, The Martian, and 2001: A Space Odyssey, renowned contemporary artist Camomile Hixon reminds us that by reaching for the stars, we can chase our full potential beyond Earth, while also transforming ourselves and our understanding of the Pale Blue Dot we call home.We stand at the threshold of interplanetary travel: SpaceX rockets are now routinely leaving Earth and NASA’s new Perseverance rover is searching for signs of ancient life on the Red Planet. Not since the moon landing in 1969 has space—or the promise of a transformational future for humankind—felt so close. Do we dare to reach for it? Yearning to know the stars has long united humanity and ignited our imaginations. And while here on Earth we grapple with deep unrest—economic struggle, political upheaval, gender discrimination, pandemics, racial tensions, climate change—the potential of a colony on Mars has sparked a new, universal hope and a heightened sense of collective purpose as we discover our ultimate destiny beyond Earth’s orbit. Celebrating the limitless potential of space and the human spirit, Hixon’s indelible essays and fantastical works of art invite us to imagine a transcendent future where we reach together for absolute freedom, unconditional love, and wellness on our grand quest for world peace. Weaving science, history, art, and philosophy with meditations on higher consciousness inspired by seeing the Earth from Space, Space Nomads is a book of unbridled optimism for the future.
£21.73
Peepal Tree Press Ltd Chameleon and Other Stories
When a young white child growing up in Tanzania discovers why her family’s African gardener so dislikes the chameleon she spots in a tree, she is plunged into a puzzled awareness of the complexities of race, colour and difference.As the ‘I’ of the stories grows into adulthood in Nigeria, she too becomes a chameleon of sorts, one thing when she is with her Nigerian friends, another with the white tribe when she can no longer resist the lure of the scarce luxuries to be had at the British embassy. When the ‘I’ makes the crossing from Nigeria to the Caribbean, she discovers that it is not only people who are chameleons. Osun, the Yoruba orisha has also made the journey, a little outwardly changed, but inwardly the same in Trinidadian and Cuban manifestations.In the earlier stories, the ‘I’ has a childhood innocence that, in the comment of the distinguished poet UA Fanthorpe, ‘sees all the better for not understanding’. With increasing awareness comes a sense of being an outsider in almost all situations, though in playing mas’ in the Trinidad carnival, there is a glimpse of the transcendence of belonging to the collective. Whether as the child trying to understand her parents, their Muslim servant’s sense of the sacred, or the ‘incomprehensible prohibitions’ of a colonial childhood, there is a constant tension between the sense of separateness and the desire for belonging. And though each of the stories is a first person narrative, what stands out in Bryce’s careful, elegant writing is a very concrete sense of the reality and autonomy of other voices, other views.
£14.08
Surrey Books,U.S. State
Set against a backdrop of social change during the 1970s, State is an important, compelling, and entertaining first-person account of what it was like to live through both traditional gender discrimination in sports and the joy of the very first days of equality—or at least the closest that one high school girls’ basketball team ever came to it. In 1975, freshman Melissa Isaacson—along with the other girls who’d spent summers with their noses pressed against the fences of Little League ball fields, unable to play—entered Niles West High School in suburban Chicago with one goal: make a team, any team. For “Missy,” that team turned out to be basketball. Title IX had passed just three years earlier, prohibiting gender discrimination in education programs or activities, including athletics. As a result, states like Illinois began implementing varsity competition—and state tournaments—for girls’ high school sports. At the time, Missy and her teammates didn’t really understand the legislation. All they knew was they finally had opportunities—to play, to learn, to sweat, to lose, to win—and an identity: They were athletes. They were a team. And in 1979, they became state champions. With the intimate insights of the girl who lived it, the pacing of a born storyteller, and the painstaking reporting of a veteran sports journalist, Isaacson chronicles one high school team’s journey to the state championship. In doing so, Isaacson shows us how a group of “tomboy” misfits found themselves and each other, and how basketball rescued them from their collective frustrations and troubled homes, and forever altered the course of their lives. Supplemental educator materials are available from the publisher.
£14.30