Search results for ""university of minnesota press""

An illuminating volume of critical essays charting the diverse territory of digital humanities scholarship The digital humanities have traditionally been considered to be the domain of only a small number of prominent and well-funded institutions. However, through a diverse range of critical essays, this volume serves to challenge and enlarge existing notions of how digital humanities research is being undertaken while also serving as a kind of alternative guide for how it can thrive within a wide variety of institutional spaces. Focusing on the complex infrastructure that undergirds the field of digital humanities, People, Practice, Power examines the various economic, social, and political factors that shape such academic endeavors. The multitude of perspectives comprising this collection offers both a much-needed critique of the existing structures for digital scholarship and the means to generate broader representation within the field. This collection provides a vital contribution to the realm of digital scholarly research and pedagogy in acknowledging the role that small liberal arts colleges, community colleges, historically black colleges and universities, and other underresourced institutions play in its advancement. Gathering together a range of voices both established and emergent, People, Practice, Power offers practitioners a self-reflexive examination of the current conditions under which the digital humanities are evolving, while helping to open up new sustainable pathways for its future. Contributors: Matthew Applegate, Molloy College; Taylor Arnold, U of Richmond; Eduard Arriaga, U of Indianapolis; Lydia Bello, Seattle U; Kathi Inman Berens, Portland State U; Christina Boyles, Michigan State U; Laura R. Braunstein, Dartmouth College; Abby R. Broughton; Maria Sachiko Cecire, Bard College; Brennan Collins, Georgia State U; Kelsey Corlett-Rivera, U of Maryland; Brittany de Gail, U of Maryland; Madelynn Dickerson, UC Irvine Libraries; Nathan H. Dize, Vanderbilt U; Quinn Dombrowski, Stanford U; Ashley Sanders Garcia, UCLA; Laura Gerlitz; Erin Rose Glass; Kaitlyn Grant; Margaret Hogarth, Claremont Colleges; Maryse Ndilu Kiese, U of Alberta; Pamella R. Lach, San Diego State U; James Malazita, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute; Susan Merriam, Bard College; Chelsea Miya, U of Alberta; Jamila Moore Pewu, California State U, Fullerton; Urszula Pawlicka-Deger, Aalto U, Finland; Jessica Pressman, San Diego State U; Jana Remy, Chapman U; Roopika Risam, Salem State U; Elizabeth Rodrigues, Grinnell College; Dylan Ruediger, American Historical Association; Rachel Schnepper, Wesleyan U; Anelise Hanson Shrout, Bates College; Margaret Simon, North Carolina State U; Mengchi Sun, U of Alberta; Lauren Tilton, U of Richmond; Michelle R. Warren, Dartmouth College.

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An illuminating volume of critical essays charting the diverse territory of digital humanities scholarship The digital humanities have traditionally been considered to be the domain of only a small number of prominent and well-funded institutions. However, through a diverse range of critical essays, this volume serves to challenge and enlarge existing notions of how digital humanities research is being undertaken while also serving as a kind of alternative guide for how it can thrive within a wide variety of institutional spaces. Focusing on the complex infrastructure that undergirds the field of digital humanities, People, Practice, Power examines the various economic, social, and political factors that shape such academic endeavors. The multitude of perspectives comprising this collection offers both a much-needed critique of the existing structures for digital scholarship and the means to generate broader representation within the field. This collection provides a vital contribution to the realm of digital scholarly research and pedagogy in acknowledging the role that small liberal arts colleges, community colleges, historically black colleges and universities, and other underresourced institutions play in its advancement. Gathering together a range of voices both established and emergent, People, Practice, Power offers practitioners a self-reflexive examination of the current conditions under which the digital humanities are evolving, while helping to open up new sustainable pathways for its future. Contributors: Matthew Applegate, Molloy College; Taylor Arnold, U of Richmond; Eduard Arriaga, U of Indianapolis; Lydia Bello, Seattle U; Kathi Inman Berens, Portland State U; Christina Boyles, Michigan State U; Laura R. Braunstein, Dartmouth College; Abby R. Broughton; Maria Sachiko Cecire, Bard College; Brennan Collins, Georgia State U; Kelsey Corlett-Rivera, U of Maryland; Brittany de Gail, U of Maryland; Madelynn Dickerson, UC Irvine Libraries; Nathan H. Dize, Vanderbilt U; Quinn Dombrowski, Stanford U; Ashley Sanders Garcia, UCLA; Laura Gerlitz; Erin Rose Glass; Kaitlyn Grant; Margaret Hogarth, Claremont Colleges; Maryse Ndilu Kiese, U of Alberta; Pamella R. Lach, San Diego State U; James Malazita, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute; Susan Merriam, Bard College; Chelsea Miya, U of Alberta; Jamila Moore Pewu, California State U, Fullerton; Urszula Pawlicka-Deger, Aalto U, Finland; Jessica Pressman, San Diego State U; Jana Remy, Chapman U; Roopika Risam, Salem State U; Elizabeth Rodrigues, Grinnell College; Dylan Ruediger, American Historical Association; Rachel Schnepper, Wesleyan U; Anelise Hanson Shrout, Bates College; Margaret Simon, North Carolina State U; Mengchi Sun, U of Alberta; Lauren Tilton, U of Richmond; Michelle R. Warren, Dartmouth College.

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A questioning of the belief in the power of LGBTQ visibility through the lives of queer women in the rural Midwest Today most LGBTQ rights supporters take for granted the virtue of being “out, loud, and proud.” Most also assume that it would be terrible to be LGBTQ in a rural place. By considering moments in which queerness and rurality come into contact, Visibility Interrupted argues that both positions are wrong. In the first monograph on LGBTQ women in the rural Midwest, Carly Thomsen deconstructs the image of the rural as a flat, homogenous, and anachronistic place where LGBTQ people necessarily suffer. And she suggests that visibility is not liberation and will not lead to liberation. Far from being an unambiguous good, argues Thomsen, visibility politics can, in fact, preclude collective action. They also advance metronormativity, postraciality, and capitalism. To make these interventions, Thomsen develops the theory of unbecoming: interrogating the relationship between that which we celebrate and that which we find disdainful—the past, the rural, politics—is crucial for developing alternative subjectivities and politics. Unbecoming precedes becoming. Drawing from critical race studies, disability studies, and queer Marxism, in addition to feminist and queer studies, the insights of this book will be useful to scholars theorizing issues far beyond sexuality and place and to social justice activists who want to move beyond visibility.

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A questioning of the belief in the power of LGBTQ visibility through the lives of queer women in the rural Midwest Today most LGBTQ rights supporters take for granted the virtue of being “out, loud, and proud.” Most also assume that it would be terrible to be LGBTQ in a rural place. By considering moments in which queerness and rurality come into contact, Visibility Interrupted argues that both positions are wrong. In the first monograph on LGBTQ women in the rural Midwest, Carly Thomsen deconstructs the image of the rural as a flat, homogenous, and anachronistic place where LGBTQ people necessarily suffer. And she suggests that visibility is not liberation and will not lead to liberation. Far from being an unambiguous good, argues Thomsen, visibility politics can, in fact, preclude collective action. They also advance metronormativity, postraciality, and capitalism. To make these interventions, Thomsen develops the theory of unbecoming: interrogating the relationship between that which we celebrate and that which we find disdainful—the past, the rural, politics—is crucial for developing alternative subjectivities and politics. Unbecoming precedes becoming. Drawing from critical race studies, disability studies, and queer Marxism, in addition to feminist and queer studies, the insights of this book will be useful to scholars theorizing issues far beyond sexuality and place and to social justice activists who want to move beyond visibility.

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St. Paul, Minnesota. October 1, 1917. High above the city, a renowned local financier named Artemis Dodge lies facedown on the floor of his armored penthouse sanctuary, a single bullet hole in his head. Thirty stories up, in the city’s tallest building, and not a shred of evidence or sign pointing to anyone having broken into the wealthy man’s fortress. It is—to all appearances—an impossible crime. Enter Shadwell Rafferty: Irishman, St. Paul saloonkeeper, sometime detective, and old friend of the celebrated sleuth Sherlock Holmes. Summoned by Louis B. Hill—son of railroad magnate James J. Hill—to investigate, Rafferty descends into a world dominated by greedy tycoons and awash in political intrigue and wartime fearmongering. Suspects lurk in every corner of the city—including Dodge’s beautiful young widow, his slippery assistant, and a shadowy anarchist—and Rafferty pursues them from the streets of Ramsey Hill and the rooms of the Ryan Hotel to the labyrinthine caves under the Schmidt brewery. Matching wits with his foes at the police department and his unsavory rival, the St. Paul detective Mordecai Jones, Rafferty knows that in order to bring a killer to justice he must first unravel the riddle of a single bullet fired in a locked room, three hundred feet above the streets of St. Paul.Set during a bitter streetcar strike and amid the clandestine activities of a ruthless commission charged with enforcing wartime patriotism, Larry Millett has created a classic and perfectly executed locked-room mystery in the great tradition of John Dickson Carr. From locked rooms and civil unrest to murder and wartime paranoia, The Magic Bullet presents Rafferty’s most challenging case, and its gripping conclusion—with a timely assist from Sherlock Holmes—finds both Rafferty and Millett at the top of their games.

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Examining the intersection of Palestine solidarity movements and antiracist activism in France from the 1970s to the present For the pasty fifty years, the Palestinian question has served as a rallying cry in the struggle for migrant rights in postcolonial France, from the immigrant labor associations of the 1970s and Beur movements of the 1980s to the militant decolonial groups of the 2000s. In Natives against Nativism, Olivia C. Harrison explores the intersection of anticolonial solidarity and antiracist activism from the 1970s to the present.Natives against Nativism analyzes a wide range of texts—novels, memoirs, plays, films, and militant archives—that mobilize the twin figures of the Palestinian and the American Indian in a crossed critique of Eurocolonial modernity. Harrison argues that anticolonial solidarity with Palestinians and Indigenous Americans has been instrumental in developing a sophisticated critique of racism across imperial formations—in this case, France, the United States, and Israel.Serving as the first relational study of antiracism in France, Natives against Nativism observes how claims to indigeneity have been deployed in multiple directions, both in the ongoing struggle for migrant rights and racial justice, and in white nativist claims in France today.

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At the dawn of the digital era in the final decades of the twentieth century, film and media studies scholars grappled with the prospective end of what was deemed cinema: analog celluloid production, darkened public movie theaters, festival culture. The notion of the “end of cinema” had already been broached repeatedly over the course of the twentieth century—from the introduction of sound and color to the advent of television and video—and in Ends of Cinema, contributors reinvigorate this debate to contemplate the ends, as well as directions and new beginnings, of cinema in the twenty-first century.In this volume, scholars at the forefront of film and media studies interrogate multiple potential “ends” of cinema: its goals and spaces, its relationship to postcinema, its racial dynamics and environmental implications, and its theoretical and historical conclusions. Moving beyond the predictable question of digital versus analog, the scholars gathered here rely on critical theory and historical research to consider cinema alongside its media companions: television, the gallery space, digital media, and theatrical environments. Ends of Cinema underscores the shared project of film and media studies to open up what seems closed off, and to continually reinvent approaches that seem unresponsive. Contributors: Caetlin Benson-Allott, Georgetown U; James Leo Cahill, U of Toronto; Francesco Casetti, Yale U; Mary Ann Doane, U of California Berkeley; André Gaudreault, U de Montréal; Michael Boyce Gillespie, City College of New York; Mark Paul Meyer, EYE Filmmuseum; Jennifer Lynn Peterson, Woodbury U, Los Angeles; Amy Villarejo, Cornell U.

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Chronicles the creation of Meredith Willson’s The Music Man—reprinted now as the Broadway Edition Composer Meredith Willson described The Music Man as “an Iowan’s attempt to pay tribute to his home state.” Now featuring a new foreword by noted singer and educator Michael Feinstein, this book presents Willson’s reflections on the ups and downs, surprises and disappointments, and finally successes of making one of America’s most popular musicals. Willson’s whimsical, personable writing style brings readers back in time with him to the 1950s to experience firsthand the exciting trials and tribulations of creating a Broadway masterpiece. Fresh admiration of the musical—and the man behind the music—is sure to result.

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Reimagining transparency and secrecy in the era of digital data When total data surveillance delimits agency and revelations of political wrongdoing fail to have consequences, is transparency the social panacea liberal democracies purport it to be? This book sets forth the provocative argument that progressive social goals would be better served by a radical form of secrecy, at least while state and corporate forces hold an asymmetrical advantage over the less powerful in data control. Clare Birchall asks: How might transparency actually serve agendas that are far from transparent? Can we imagine a secrecy that could act in the service of, rather than against, a progressive politics? To move beyond atomizing calls for privacy and to interrupt the perennial tension between state security and the public’s right to know, Birchall adapts Édouard Glissant’s thinking to propose a digital “right to opacity.” As a crucial element of radical secrecy, she argues, this would eventually give rise to a “postsecret” society, offering an understanding and experience of the political that is free from the false choice between secrecy and transparency. She grounds her arresting story in case studies including the varied presidential styles of George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Donald Trump; the Snowden revelations; conspiracy theories espoused or endorsed by Trump; WikiLeaks and guerrilla transparency; and the opening of the state through data portals.Postsecrecy is the necessary condition for imagining, finally, an alternative vision of “the good,” of equality, as neither shaped by neoliberal incarnations of transparency nor undermined by secret state surveillance. Not least, postsecrecy reimagines collective resistance in the era of digital data.

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How computer animation technologies became vital visualization tools in the life sciences Who would have thought that computer animation technologies developed in the second half of the twentieth century would become essential visualization tools in today’s biosciences? This book is the first to examine this phenomenon. Molecular Capture reveals how popular media consumption and biological knowledge production have converged in molecular animations—computer simulations of molecular and cellular processes that immerse viewers in the temporal unfolding of molecular worlds—to produce new regimes of seeing and knowing.Situating the development of this technology within an evolving field of historical, epistemological, and political negotiations, Adam Nocek argues that molecular animations not only represent a key transformation in the visual knowledge practices of life scientists but also bring into sharp focus fundamental mutations in power within neoliberal capitalism. In particular, he reveals how the convergence of the visual economies of science and entertainment in molecular animations extends neoliberal modes of governance to the perceptual practices of scientific subjects. Drawing on Alfred North Whitehead’s speculative metaphysics and Michel Foucault’s genealogy of governmentality, Nocek builds a media philosophy well equipped to examine the unique coordination of media cultures in this undertheorized form of scientific media. More specifically, he demonstrates how governmentality operates across visual practices in the biosciences and the popular mediasphere to shape a molecular animation apparatus that unites scientific knowledge and entertainment culture.Ultimately, Molecular Capture proposes that molecular animation is an achievement of governmental design. It weaves together speculative media philosophy, science and technology studies, and design theory to investigate how scientific knowledge practices are designed through media apparatuses.

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How special education used disability labels to marginalize Black students in public schoolsThe Unteachables examines the overrepresentation of Black students in special education over the course of the twentieth century. As African American children integrated predominantly white schools, many were disproportionately labeled educable mentally retarded (EMR), learning disabled (LD), and emotionally behavioral disordered (EBD). Keith A. Mayes charts the evolution of disability categories and how these labels kept Black learners segregated in American classrooms.The civil rights and the educational disability rights movements, Mayes shows, have both collaborated and worked at cross-purposes since the beginning of school desegregation. Disability rights advocates built upon the opportunity provided by the civil rights movement to make claims about student invisibility at the level of intellectual and cognitive disabilities. Although special education ostensibly included children from all racial groups, educational disability rights advocates focused on the needs of white disabled students, while school systems used disability discourses to malign and marginalize Black students.From the 1940s to the present, social science researchers, policymakers, school administrators, and teachers have each contributed to the overrepresentation of Black students in special education. Excavating the deep-seated racism embedded in both the public school system and public policy, The Unteachables explores the discriminatory labeling of Black students, and how it indelibly contributed to special education disproportionality, to student discipline and push-out practices, and to the school-to-prison pipeline effect.

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A necessary, rich new examination of how the wired world affects our humanity Our tech-fueled economy is often touted as a boon for the development of our fullest human potential. But as our interactions are increasingly turned into mountains of data sifted by algorithms, what impact does this infinite accumulation and circulation of information really have on us? What are the hidden mechanisms that drive our continuous engagement with the digital?In The Other Side of the Digital, Andrea Righi argues that the Other of the digital acts as a new secular God, exerting its power through endless accountability that forces us to sacrifice ourselves for the digital. Righi deconstructs the contradictions inherent in our digital world, examining how ideas of knowledge, desire, writing, temporality, and the woman are being reconfigured by our sacrificial economy. His analyses include how both our self-image and our perception of reality are skewed by technologies like fitness bands, matchmaking apps, and search engines, among others.The Other Side of the Digital provides a necessary, in-depth cultural analysis of how the political theology of the new media functions under neoliberalism. Drawing on the work of well-known thinkers like Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan, and Ludwig Wittgenstein, as well as Carla Lonzi, Luisa Muraro, and Luciano Parinetto, Righi creates novel appraisals of popular digital tools that we now use routinely to process life experiences. Asking why we must sign up for this sort of regime, The Other Side of the Digital is an important wake-up call to a world deeply entangled with the digital.

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A necessary, rich new examination of how the wired world affects our humanity Our tech-fueled economy is often touted as a boon for the development of our fullest human potential. But as our interactions are increasingly turned into mountains of data sifted by algorithms, what impact does this infinite accumulation and circulation of information really have on us? What are the hidden mechanisms that drive our continuous engagement with the digital?In The Other Side of the Digital, Andrea Righi argues that the Other of the digital acts as a new secular God, exerting its power through endless accountability that forces us to sacrifice ourselves for the digital. Righi deconstructs the contradictions inherent in our digital world, examining how ideas of knowledge, desire, writing, temporality, and the woman are being reconfigured by our sacrificial economy. His analyses include how both our self-image and our perception of reality are skewed by technologies like fitness bands, matchmaking apps, and search engines, among others.The Other Side of the Digital provides a necessary, in-depth cultural analysis of how the political theology of the new media functions under neoliberalism. Drawing on the work of well-known thinkers like Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan, and Ludwig Wittgenstein, as well as Carla Lonzi, Luisa Muraro, and Luciano Parinetto, Righi creates novel appraisals of popular digital tools that we now use routinely to process life experiences. Asking why we must sign up for this sort of regime, The Other Side of the Digital is an important wake-up call to a world deeply entangled with the digital.

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A rigorous and imaginative inquiry into rhythm’s vital importance for film and the moving imageFocusing attention on a concept much neglected in the study of film, The Rhythm of Images opens new possibilities for thinking about expanded perception and idiosyncratic modes of being. Author Domietta Torlasco engages with both philosophy and cinema to elaborate a notion of rhythm in its pre-Socratic sense as a “manner of flowing”—a fugitive mode that privileges contingency and calls up the forgotten fluidity of forms. In asking what it would mean to take this rhythm as an ontological force in its own right, she creatively draws on thinkers such as Giorgio Agamben, Roland Barthes, Gilles Deleuze, and Luce Irigaray. Rhythm emerges here as a form that eludes measure, a key to redefining the relation between the aesthetic and the political, and thus a pivotal means of resistance to power.Working with constellations of films and videos by international artists—from Michelangelo Antonioni, Jean-Luc Godard, and David Lynch to Harun Farocki and Victor Burgin, among others—Torlasco brings to bear on them her distinctive concept of rhythm with respect to four interrelated domains: life, labor, memory, and medium. With innovative readings of artworks and critical texts alike, The Rhythm of Images fashions a vibrant, provocative theory of rhythm as the excess or potential of perception. Ultimately, the book reconceives the relation between rhythm and the world-making power of images. The result is a vision of cinema as a hybrid medium endowed with the capacity not only to reinvent corporeal boundaries but also to find new ways of living together.

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How are human actions shaped by the materiality of media? Contemporary media leads us more than ever to an ‘acting at a distance,’ an acting entangled with the materiality of communication and the mediality of transmission. This book explores this crucial phenomenon thereby introducing urgent questions of human interaction, the binding and breaking of time and space, and the entanglement of the material and the immaterial. Three vivid inquiries deal with histories and theories of mediality and materiality: John Durham Peters looks at episodes of simultaneity and synchronization. Christina Vagt discusses the agency of computer models against the backdrop of aesthetic theories by Henri Bergson and Hans Blumenberg, and Florian Sprenger discusses early electrical transmissions through copper wire and the temporality of instantaneity.

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A sixty-year history of Afro–South Asian musical collaborations From Beyoncé’s South Asian music–inspired Super Bowl Halftime performance, to jazz artists like John and Alice Coltrane’s use of Indian song structures and spirituality in their work, to Jay-Z and Missy Elliott’s high-profile collaborations with diasporic South Asian artists such as the Panjabi MC and MIA, African American musicians have frequently engaged South Asian cultural productions in the development of Black music culture. Sounds from the Other Side traces such engagements through an interdisciplinary analysis of the political implications of African American musicians’ South Asian influence since the 1960s. Elliott H. Powell asks, what happens when we consider Black musicians’ South Asian sonic explorations as distinct from those of their white counterparts? He looks to Black musical genres of jazz, funk, and hip hop and examines the work of Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Rick James, OutKast, Timbaland, Beyoncé, and others, showing how Afro–South Asian music in the United States is a dynamic, complex, and contradictory cultural site where comparative racialization, transformative gender and queer politics, and coalition politics intertwine. Powell situates this cultural history within larger global and domestic sociohistorical junctures that link African American and South Asian diasporic communities in the United States. The long historical arc of Afro–South Asian music in Sounds from the Other Side interprets such music-making activities as highly political endeavors, offering an essential conversation about cross-cultural musical exchanges between racially marginalized musicians.

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An engrossing history of the century that transformed our knowledge of the body’s inner senses The years between 1833 and 1945 fundamentally transformed science’s understanding of the body’s inner senses, revolutionizing fields like philosophy, the social sciences, and cognitive science. In How We Became Sensorimotor, Mark Paterson provides a systematic account of this transformative period, while also demonstrating its substantial implications for current explorations into phenomenology, embodied consciousness, the extended mind, and theories of the sensorimotor, the body, and embodiment.Each chapter of How We Became Sensorimotor takes a particular sense and historicizes its formation by means of recent scientific studies, case studies, or coverage in the media. Ranging among a diverse array of sensations, including balance, fatigue, pain, the “muscle sense,” and what Maurice Merleau-Ponty termed “motricity,” Paterson’s analysis moves outward from the familiar confines of the laboratory to those of the industrial world and even to wild animals and their habitats. He uncovers important stories, such as how forgotten pain-measurement schemes transformed criminology, or how Penfield’s outmoded concepts of the sensory and motor homunculi of the brain still mar psychology textbooks.Complete with original archival research featuring illustrations and correspondence, How We Became Sensorimotor shows how the shifting and sometimes contested historical background to our understandings of the senses are being extended even today.

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Tells the story of Jamaican “scammers” who use crime to gain autonomy, opportunity, and repair There is romance in stealing from the rich to give to the poor, but how does that change when those perceived rich are elderly white North Americans and the poor are young Black Jamaicans? In this innovative ethnography, Jovan Scott Lewis tells the story of Omar, Junior, and Dwayne. Young and poor, they strive to make a living in Montego Bay, where call centers and tourism are the two main industries in the struggling economy. Their experience of grinding poverty and drastically limited opportunity leads them to conclude that scamming is the best means of gaining wealth and advancement. Otherwise, they are doomed to live in “sufferation”—an inescapable poverty that breeds misery, frustration, and vexation. In the Jamaican lottery scam run by these men, targets are told they have qualified for a large loan or award if they pay taxes or transfer fees. When the fees are paid, the award never arrives, netting the scammers tens of thousands of U.S. dollars. Through interviews, historical sources, song lyrics, and court testimonies, Lewis examines how these scammers justify their deceit, discovering an ethical narrative that reformulates ideas of crime and transgression and their relationship to race, justice, and debt. Scammer’s Yard describes how these young men, seeking to overcome inequality and achieve autonomy, come to view crime as a form of liberation. Their logic raises unsettling questions about a world economy that relegates postcolonial populations to deprivation even while expecting them to follow the rules of capitalism that exacerbate their dispossession. In this groundbreaking account, Lewis asks whether true reparation for the legacy of colonialism is to be found only through radical—even criminal—means.

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A timely, politically savvy examination of how impossible disasters shape the very real possibilities of our worldWhy would the normally buttoned-down national security state imagine lurid future scenarios like a zombie apocalypse? In Training for Catastrophe, author Lindsay Thomas shows how our security regime reimagines plausibility to focus on unlikely and even unreal events rather than probable ones. With an in-depth focus on preparedness (a pivotal, emergent national security paradigm since 9/11) she explores how fiction shapes national security.Thomas finds fiction at work in unexpected settings, from policy documents and workplace training manuals to comics and video games. Through these texts—as well as plenty of science fiction—she examines the philosophy of preparedness, interrogating the roots of why it asks us to treat explicitly fictional events as real. Thomas connects this philosophical underpinning to how preparedness plays out in contemporary politics, emphasizing how it uses aesthetic elements like realism, genre, character, and plot to train people both to regard some disasters as normal and to ignore others.Training for Catastrophe makes an important case for how these documents elicit consent and compliance. Thomas draws from a huge archive of texts—including a Centers for Disease Control comic about a zombie apocalypse, the work of Audre Lorde, and the political thrillers of former national security advisor Richard Clarke—to ask difficult questions about the uses and values of fiction. A major statement on how national security intrudes into questions of art and life, Training for Catastrophe is a timely intervention into how we confront disasters.

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A comprehensive study of ephemera in twentieth-century literature—and its relevance to the twenty-first century “Nothing ever really disappears from the internet” has become a common warning of the digital age. But the twentieth century was filled with ephemera—items that were designed to disappear forever—and these objects played crucial roles in some of that century’s greatest works of literature. In The Death of Things, author Sarah Wasserman delivers the first comprehensive study addressing the role ephemera played in twentieth-century fiction and its relevance to contemporary digital culture. Representing the experience of perpetual change and loss, ephemera was central to great works by major novelists like Don DeLillo, Ralph Ellison, and Marilynne Robinson. Following the lives and deaths of objects, Wasserman imagines new uses of urban space, new forms of visibility for marginalized groups, and new conceptions of the marginal itself. She also inquires into present-day conundrums: our fascination with the durable, our concerns with the digital, and our curiosity about what new fictional narratives have to say about deletion and preservation. The Death of Things offers readers fascinating, original angles on how objects shape our world. Creating an alternate literary history of the twentieth century, Wasserman delivers an insightful and idiosyncratic journey through objects that were once vital but are now forgotten.

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Personal and simple, earthy and warm—recipes and stories from the Steger Wilderness Center in Minnesota’s north woods The Steger Homestead Kitchen is an inspiring and down-to-earth collection of meals and memories gathered at the Homestead, the home of the Arctic explorer and environmental activist Will Steger, located in the north woods near Ely, Minnesota. Founded in 1988, the Steger Wilderness Center was established to model viable carbon-neutral solutions, teach ecological stewardship, and address climate change. In her role as the Homestead’s chef, Will’s niece Rita Mae creates delicious and hearty meals that become a cornerstone experience for visitors from all over the world, nourishing them as they learn and share their visions for a healthy and abundant future. Now, with this new book, home chefs can make Rita Mae’s simple, hearty meals to share around their own homestead tables. Interwoven with dozens of mouth-watering recipes—for generous breakfasts (Almond Berry Griddlecakes), warming lunches (Northwoods Mushroom Wild Rice Soup), elegant dinners (Spatchcock Chicken with Blueberry Maple Glaze), desserts (Very Carrot Cake), and snacks (Steger Wilderness Bars)—are Will Steger’s exhilarating stories of epic adventures exploring the Earth’s most remote and endangered regions.The Steger Homestead Kitchen opens up the Wilderness Center’s hospitality, its heart and hearth, providing the practical advice and inspiration to cook up a good life in harmony with nature.

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In light of current discourses on AI and robotics, what do the various experiences of art contribute to the rethinking of technology today?Art and Cosmotechnics addresses the challenge of technology to the existence of art and traditional thought, especially in light of current discourses on artificial intelligence and robotics. It carries out an attempt on the cosmotechnics of Chinese landscape painting in order to address this question, and further asks: What is the significance of shanshui (mountain and water) in face of the new challenges brought about by the current technological transformation? Thinking art and cosmotechnics together is an attempt to look into the varieties of experiences of art and to ask what these experiences might contribute to the rethinking of technology today.

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The nature of the common loon, from biology to behavior, from one of the world’s foremost observers of the revered waterbird Even those who know the loon’s call might not recognize it as a tremolo, yodel, or wail, and may not understand what each call means, how it’s made, and why. And those who marvel at the loon’s diving prowess might wonder why this bird has such skill, or where loons go when they must leave northern lakes in winter. For these and so many other mysteries, Loon Lessons provides evolutionary and ecological explanations that are curious and compelling. Written by one of the world’s foremost experts on the subject, the book is a compendium of knowledge about the common loon and an engaging record of scientific sleuthing, documenting more than twenty-five years of research into the great northern diver.James D. Paruk has observed and compared loons from Washington and Saskatchewan to the coasts of California and Louisiana, from high elevation deserts in Nevada to mountain lakes in Maine. Drawing on his extensive experience, a wealth of data, and well-established scientific principles, he considers every aspect of the loon, from its plumage and anatomy to its breeding, migration, and wintering strategies. Here, in the first detailed scientific account of the common loon in more than thirty years, Paruk describes its biology in an accessible and entertaining style that affords a deeper understanding of this beautiful and mysterious bird’s natural history and annual life cycle.

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Delves deep into the archives that keep the history and work of AIDS activism alive Serving as a vital supplement to the existing scholarship on AIDS activism of the 1980s and 1990s, ViralCultures is the first book to critically examine the archives that have helped preserve and create the legacy of those radical activities. Marika Cifor charts the efforts activists, archivists, and curators have made to document the work of AIDS activism in the United States and the infrastructure developed to maintain it, safeguarding the material for future generations to remember these social movements and to revitalize the epidemic’s past in order to remake the present and future of AIDS. Drawing on large institutional archives such as the New York Public Library, as well as those developed by small, community-based organizations, this work of archival ethnography details how contemporary activists, artists, and curators use these records to build on the cultural legacy of AIDS activism to challenge the conditions of injustice that continue to undergird current AIDS crises. Cifor analyzes the various power structures through which these archives are mediated, demonstrating how ideology shapes the nature of archival material and how it is accessed and used. Positioning vital nostalgia as both a critical faculty and a generative practice, this book explores the act of saving this activist past and reanimating it in the digital age. While many books, popular films, and major exhibitions have contributed to a necessary awareness of HIV and AIDS activism, Viral Cultures provides a crucial missing link by highlighting the powerful role of archives in making those cultural moments possible.

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A groundbreaking study of Blackness in Morocco through the lens of visual representation For more than thirteen centuries, caravans transported millions of enslaved people from Africa south of the Sahara into what is now the Kingdom of Morocco. Today there are no museums, plaques, or monuments that recognize this history of enslavement, but enslaved people and their descendants created the Gnawa identity that preserves this largely suppressed heritage. This pioneering book describes how Gnawa emerged as a practice associated with Blackness and enslavement by reviewing visual representation and musical traditions from the late nineteenth century to the present. Cynthia J. Becker addresses the historical consciousness of subaltern groups and how they give Blackness material form through modes of dress, visual art, religious ceremonies, and musical instruments in performance. She examines what it means to self-identify as Black in Morocco (a country typically associated with the Middle East and the Arab world), especially during this time of increased contemporary African migration, which has made Blackness even more visible. Her case studies draw on archival material and on her extended research in the city of Essaouira, site of the wildly popular Gnawa World Music Festival. Becker shows that Gnawa spirit possession ceremonies express the marginalization associated with enslavement and allow these unique communities to move toward healing, even as the mass-marketing of Gnawa music has resulted in some Gnawa practitioners engaging Blackness to claim legitimacy and spiritual power. This book challenges the framing of Africa’s cultural history into “sub-Saharan” versus “North African” or Islamic versus non-Islamic categories. Blackness in Morocco complicates how we think about the institution of slavery and its impact on North African religious and social institutions, and readers will better understand and appreciate the role of Africans in shaping global forces, including religious institutions such as Islam.

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The true story, and the black citizens, behind the evolution of racial equality in Minnesota He had just given a rousing speech to a packed assembly in St. Paul, but Frederick Douglass, confidant to the Great Emancipator and conscience of the Republican Party, was denied a hotel room because he was black. This was Minnesota in 1873, four years after the state had approved black suffrage—a state where “freedom” meant being unshackled from slavery but not social restrictions, where “equality” meant access to the ballot but not to a restaurant downtown. Spanning the half-century after the Civil War, Degrees of Freedom draws a rare picture of black experience in a northern state and of the nature of black discontent and action within a predominantly white, ostensibly progressive society. William D. Green reveals little-known historical characters among the black men and women who moved to Minnesota following the Fifteenth Amendment; worked as farmhands and laborers; built communities (such as Pig’s Eye Landing, later renamed St. Paul), businesses, and a newspaper (the Western Appeal); and embodied the slow but inexorable advancement of race relations in the state over time. Within this absorbing, often surprising, narrative we meet “ordinary” citizens, like former slave and early settler Jim Thompson and black barbers catering to a white clientele, but also personages of national stature, such as Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, and W. E. B. Du Bois, all of whom championed civil rights in Minnesota. And we see how, in a state where racial prejudice and oppression wore a liberal mask, black settlers and entrepreneurs, politicians, and activists maneuvered within a restricted political arena to bring about real and lasting change.

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What it means to celebrate the potential and the power of no What does it mean to refuse? To not participate, to not build a better world, to not come up with a plan? To just say “no”? Against the ubiquitous demands for positive solutions, action-oriented policies, and optimistic compromises, The Big No refuses to play. Here leading scholars traverse the wide range of political action when “no” is in the picture, analyzing topics such as collective action, antisocialism, empirical science, the negative and the affirmative in Deleuze and Derrida, the “real” and the “clone,” Native sovereignty, and Afropessimism.In his introduction, Kennan Ferguson sums up the concept of the “Big No,” arguing for its political importance. Whatever its form—he identifies various strains—the Big No offers power against systems of oppression. Joshua Clover argues for the importance of Marx and Fanon in understanding how people are alienated and subjugated. Theodore Martin explores the attractions of antisociality in literature and life, citing such novelists as Patricia Highsmith and Richard Wright. François Laruelle differentiates nonphilosophy from other forms of French critical theory. Katerina Kolozova applies this insight to the nature of reality itself, arguing that the confusion of thought and reality leads to manipulation, automation, and alienation. Using poetry and autobiography, Frank Wilderson shows how Black people—their bodies and being—are displaced in politics, replaced and erased by the subjectivities of violence, suffering, and absence. Andrew Culp connects these themes of negativity, comparing and contrasting the refusals of antiphilosophy and Afropessimism. Thinking critically usually demands alternatives: how would you fix things? But, as The Big No shows, being absolutely critical—declining the demands of world-building—is one necessary response to wrong, to evil. It serves as a powerful reminder that the presumption of political action is always positive.Contributors: Joshua Clover, U of California Davis and U of Copenhagen; Andrew Culp, California Institute of the Arts; Katerina Kolozova, Institute of Social Sciences and Humanities Skopje; Theodore Martin, U of California, Irvine; Anthony Paul Smith, La Salle U; Frank B. Wilderson III, U of California, Irvine.

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Understanding the processes and policies of urbanization and suburbanization in American Indian communities Nearly seven out of ten American Indians live in urban areas, yet studies of urban Indian experiences remain scant. Studies of suburban Natives are even more rare. Today’s suburban Natives, the fastest-growing American Indian demographic, highlight the tensions within federal policies working in tandem to move and house differing groups of people in very different residential locations. In American Indians and the American Dream, Kasey R. Keeler examines the long history of urbanization and suburbanization of Indian communities in Minnesota.At the intersection of federal Indian policy and federal housing policy, American Indians and the American Dream analyzes the dispossession of Indian land, property rights, and patterns of home ownership through programs and policies that sought to move communities away from their traditional homelands to reservations and, later, to urban and suburban areas. Keeler begins this analysis with the Homestead Act of 1862, then shifts to the Indian Reorganization Act in the early twentieth century, the creation of Little Earth in Minneapolis, and Indian homeownership during the housing bubble of the early 2000s.American Indians and the American Dream investigates the ways American Indians accessed homeownership, working with and against federal policy, underscoring American Indian peoples’ unequal and exclusionary access to the way of life known as the American dream. Cover alt text: Vintage photo of Native person bathing smiling child in the sink of a midcentury kitchen. Title in yellow.

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An appeal for the importance of theory, utopia, and close consideration of our contemporary dark times What does any particular theory allow us to do? What is the value of doing so? And who benefits? In Invoking Hope, Phillip E. Wegner argues for the undiminished importance of the practices of theory, utopia, and a deep and critical reading of our current situation of what Bertolt Brecht refers to as finsteren Zeiten, or dark times.Invoking Hope was written in response to three events that occurred in 2016: the five hundredth anniversary of the publication of Thomas More’s Utopia; the one hundredth anniversary of the founding text in theory, Ferdinand de Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics; and the rise of the right-wing populism that culminated in the election of Donald Trump. Wegner offers original readings of major interventions in theory alongside dazzling utopian imaginaries developed from classical Greece to our global present—from Theodor Adorno, Ernst Bloch, Alain Badiou, Jacques Derrida, Fredric Jameson, Sarah Ahmed, Susan Buck-Morss, and Jacques Lacan to such works as Plato’s Republic, W. E. B. Du Bois’s John Brown, Isak Dinesen’s “Babette’s Feast,” Kim Stanley Robinson’s 2312, and more. Wegner comments on an expansive array of modernist and contemporary literature, film, theory, and popular culture.With Invoking Hope, Wegner provides an innovative lens for considering the rise of right-wing populism and the current crisis in democracy. He discusses challenges in the humanities and higher education and develops strategies of creative critical reading and hope against the grain of current trends in scholarship.

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The preoccupation with “depth” and its relevance to cinema and media studiesFor decades the concept of depth has been central to critical thinking in numerous humanities-based disciplines, legitimizing certain modes of inquiry over others. Deep Mediations examines why and how this is, as scholars today navigate the legacy of depth models of thought and vision, particularly in light of the “surface turn” and as these models impinge on the realms of cinema and media studies.The collection’s eighteen essays seek to understand the decisive but evolving fixation on depth by considering the term’s use across a range of conversations as well as its status in relation to critical methodologies and the current mediascape. Engaging contemporary debates about new computing technologies, the environment, history, identity, affect, audio/visual culture, and the limits and politics of human perception, Deep Mediations is a timely interrogation of depth’s ongoing importance within the humanities. Contributors: Laurel Ahnert; Taylor Arnold, U of Richmond; Erika Balsom, King’s College London; Brooke Belisle, Stony Brook University; Jinhee Choi, King’s College London; Jennifer Fay, Vanderbilt U; Lisa Han, UC Santa Barbara; Jean Ma, Stanford U; Shaka McGlotten, Purchase College-SUNY; Susanna Paasonen, U of Turku, Finland; Jussi Parikka, U of Southampton; Alessandra Raengo, Georgia State U; Pooja Rangan, Amherst College; Katherine Rochester, VIA Art Fund in Boston; Karl Schoonover, University of Warwick (UK); Jordan Schonig, Michigan State U; John Paul Stadler, North Carolina State U; Nicole Starosielski, New York U; Lauren Tilton, U of Richmond.

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Questions increasingly dominant urban planning orthodoxies and whether they truly serve everyday city dwellers What makes some cities world class? Increasingly, that designation reflects the use of a toolkit of urban planning practices and policies that circulates around the globe. These strategies—establishing creative districts dedicated to technology and design, “greening” the streets, reinventing historic districts as tourist draws—were deployed to build a globally competitive Buenos Aires after its devastating 2001 economic crisis. In this richly drawn account, Jacob Lederman explores what those efforts teach us about fast-evolving changes in city planning practices and why so many local officials chase a nearly identical vision of world-class urbanism. Lederman explores the influence of Northern nongovernmental organizations and multilateral agencies on a prominent city of the global South. Using empirical data, keen observations, and interviews with people ranging from urban planners to street vendors he explores how transnational best practices actually affect the lives of city dwellers. His research also documents the forms of resistance enacted by everyday residents and the tendency of local institutions and social relations to undermine the top-down plans of officials. Most important, Lederman highlights the paradoxes of world-class urbanism: for instance, while the priorities identified by international agencies are expressed through nonmarket values such as sustainability, inclusion, and livability, local officials often use market-centric solutions to pursue them. Further, despite the progressive rhetoric used to describe urban planning goals, in most cases their result has been greater social, economic, and geographic stratification.Chasing World-Class Urbanism is a much-needed guide to the intersections of culture, ideology, and the realities of twenty-first-century life in a major Latin American city, one that illuminates the tension between technocratic aspirations and lived experience.

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More than two dozen stories of Indigenous resistance to the privatization and allotment of Indigenous lands Land privatization has been a longstanding and ongoing settler colonial process separating Indigenous peoples from their traditional homelands, with devastating consequences. Allotment Stories delves into this conflict, creating a complex conversation out of narratives of Indigenous communities resisting allotment and other dispossessive land schemes.From the use of homesteading by nineteenth-century Anishinaabe women to maintain their independence to the role that roads have played in expropriating Guam’s Indigenous heritage to the links between land loss and genocide in California, Allotment Stories collects more than two dozen chronicles of white imperialism and Indigenous resistance. Ranging from the historical to the contemporary and grappling with Indigenous land struggles around the globe, these narratives showcase both scholarly and creative forms of expression, constructing a multifaceted book of diverse disciplinary perspectives. Allotment Stories highlights how Indigenous peoples have consistently used creativity to sustain collective ties, kinship relations, and cultural commitments in the face of privatization. At once informing readers while provoking them toward further research into Indigenous resilience, this collection pieces back together some of what the forces of allotment have tried to tear apart.Contributors: Jennifer Adese, U of Toronto Mississauga; Megan Baker, U of California, Los Angeles; William Bauer Jr., U of Nevada, Las Vegas; Christine Taitano DeLisle, U of Minnesota–Twin Cities; Vicente M. Diaz, U of Minnesota–Twin Cities; Sarah Biscarra Dilley, U of California, Davis; Marilyn Dumont, U of Alberta; Munir Fakher Eldin, Birzeit U, Palestine; Nick Estes, U of New Mexico; Pauliina Feodoroff; Susan E. Gray, Arizona State U; J. Kēhaulani Kauanui, Wesleyan U; Rauna Kuokkanen, U of Lapland and U of Toronto; Sheryl R. Lightfoot, U of British Columbia; Kelly McDonough, U of Texas at Austin; Ruby Hansen Murray; Tero Mustonen, U of Eastern Finland; Darren O’Toole, U of Ottawa; Shiri Pasternak, Ryerson U; Dione Payne, Te Whare Wānaka o Aoraki–Lincoln U; Joseph M. Pierce, Stony Brook U; Khal Schneider, California State U, Sacramento; Argelia Segovia Liga, Colegio de Michoacán; Leanne Betasamosake Simpson; Jameson R. Sweet, Rutgers U; Michael P. Taylor, Brigham Young U; Candessa Tehee, Northeastern State U; Benjamin Hugh Velaise, Google American Indian Network.

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A new approach to the vast nuclear infrastructure and the apocalypses it produces, focusing on Black, queer, Indigenous, and Asian American literatures Since 1945, America has spent more resources on nuclear technology than any other national project. Although it requires a massive infrastructure that touches society on myriad levels, nuclear technology has typically been discussed in a limited, top-down fashion that clusters around powerful men. In Infrastructures of Apocalypse, Jessica Hurley turns this conventional wisdom on its head, offering a new approach that focuses on neglected authors and Black, queer, Indigenous, and Asian American perspectives. Exchanging the usual white, male “nuclear canon” for authors that include James Baldwin, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Ruth Ozeki, Infrastructures of Apocalypse delivers a fresh literary history of post-1945 America that focuses on apocalypse from below. Here Hurley critiques the racialized urban spaces of civil defense and reads nuclear waste as a colonial weapon. Uniting these diverse lines of inquiry is Hurley’s belief that apocalyptic thinking is not the opposite of engagement but rather a productive way of imagining radically new forms of engagement.Infrastructures of Apocalypse offers futurelessness as a place from which we can construct a livable world. It fills a blind spot in scholarship on American literature of the nuclear age, while also offering provocative, surprising new readings of such well-known works as Atlas Shrugged, Infinite Jest, and Angels in America. Infrastructures of Apocalypse is a revelation for readers interested in nuclear issues, decolonial literature, speculative fiction, and American studies.

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Takes the singular eco-catastrophic “Age of Man” and redefines this epoch We live in a new world: the Anthropocene. The Age of Man is defined in many ways, and most dramatically through climate change, mass extinction, and human marks in the geological record. Ideas of the Anthropocene spill out from the geophysical sciences into the humanities, social sciences, the arts, and mainstream debates—but it’s hard to know what the new coinage really means. Break Up the Anthropocene argues that this age should subvert imperial masculinity and industrial conquest by opening up the plural possibilities of Anthropocene debates of resilience, adaptation, and the struggle for environmental justice. Forerunners: Ideas First Short books of thought-in-process scholarship, where intense analysis, questioning, and speculation take the lead

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Tracing the erosion of democratic norms in the US and the conditions that make it possible Jonathan Beecher Field tracks the permutations of the town hall meeting from its original context as a form of democratic community governance in New England into a format for presidential debates and a staple of corporate governance. In its contemporary iteration, the town hall meeting models the aesthetic of the former but replaces actual democratic deliberation with a spectacle that involves no immediate electoral stakes or functions as a glorified press conference. Urgently, Field notes that though this evolution might be apparent, evidence suggests many US citizens don’t care to differentiate. Forerunners: Ideas First Short books of thought-in-process scholarship, where intense analysis, questioning, and speculation take the lead

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An original reflection on Italy’s postwar boom considers potentials for resistance in today’s neoliberal (dis)order What can 1960s Italian cinema teach us about how to live and work today? Clocking Out challenges readers to think about labor, cinema, and machines as they are intertwined in complex ways in Italian cinema of the early ’60s. Drawing on critical theory and archival research, this book asks what kinds of fractures we might exploit for living otherwise, for resisting traditional narratives, and for anticapitalism. Italy in the 1960s was a place where the mass-producing factory was the primary mode of understanding what it meant to work, but it was also a time when things might have gone another way. This thinking and living differently appears in the cracks, lapses, or moments of film. Clocking Out is organized into scenes from an obscure 1962 Italian comedy (Renzo e Luciana, from Boccaccio 70). Reconsidering the origins of paradigms such as clocking in and out, “society is a factory,” and the gendered division of labor, Karen Pinkus challenges readers to think through cinema, enabling us to see gaps and breakdowns in the postwar order. She focuses on the Olivetti typewriter company and a little-known film from an Italian anthology movie, thinking with cinema about the power of the Autonomia movement, the refusal to work, and the questions of wages, paternalism, and sexual difference. Alternating microscopic attention to details and zooming outward, Pinkus examines rituals of production, automation, repetition, and fractures in a narrative of labor that begins in the 1960s and extends to the present—the age of the precariat, right-wing resentment, and nostalgia for an order that was probably never was.

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An original reflection on Italy’s postwar boom considers potentials for resistance in today’s neoliberal (dis)order What can 1960s Italian cinema teach us about how to live and work today? Clocking Out challenges readers to think about labor, cinema, and machines as they are intertwined in complex ways in Italian cinema of the early ’60s. Drawing on critical theory and archival research, this book asks what kinds of fractures we might exploit for living otherwise, for resisting traditional narratives, and for anticapitalism. Italy in the 1960s was a place where the mass-producing factory was the primary mode of understanding what it meant to work, but it was also a time when things might have gone another way. This thinking and living differently appears in the cracks, lapses, or moments of film. Clocking Out is organized into scenes from an obscure 1962 Italian comedy (Renzo e Luciana, from Boccaccio 70). Reconsidering the origins of paradigms such as clocking in and out, “society is a factory,” and the gendered division of labor, Karen Pinkus challenges readers to think through cinema, enabling us to see gaps and breakdowns in the postwar order. She focuses on the Olivetti typewriter company and a little-known film from an Italian anthology movie, thinking with cinema about the power of the Autonomia movement, the refusal to work, and the questions of wages, paternalism, and sexual difference. Alternating microscopic attention to details and zooming outward, Pinkus examines rituals of production, automation, repetition, and fractures in a narrative of labor that begins in the 1960s and extends to the present—the age of the precariat, right-wing resentment, and nostalgia for an order that was probably never was.

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Thinking through object-oriented ontology—and the work of architects such as Rem Koolhaas and Zaha Hadid—to explore new concepts of the relationship between form and function Object-oriented ontology has become increasingly popular among architectural theorists and practitioners in recent years. Architecture and Objects, the first book on architecture by the founder of object-oriented ontology (OOO), deepens the exchange between architecture and philosophy, providing a new roadmap to OOO’s influence on the language and practice of contemporary architecture and offering new conceptions of the relationship between form and function. Graham Harman opens with a critique of Heidegger, Derrida, and Deleuze, the three philosophers whose ideas have left the deepest imprint on the field, highlighting the limits of their thinking for architecture. Instead, Harman contends, architecture can employ OOO to reconsider traditional notions of form and function that emphasize their relational characteristics—form with a building’s visual style, function with its stated purpose—and constrain architecture’s possibilities through literalism. Harman challenges these understandings by proposing de-relationalized versions of both (zero-form and zero-function) that together provide a convincing rejoinder to Immanuel Kant’s dismissal of architecture as “impure.”Through critical engagement with the writings of Peter Eisenman and fresh assessments of buildings by Rem Koolhaas, Frank Gehry, and Zaha Hadid, Architecture and Objects forwards a bold vision of architecture. Overcoming the difficult task of “zeroing” function, Harman concludes, would place architecture at the forefront of a necessary revitalization of exhausted aesthetic paradigms.

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A bold new indictment of the racialization of science Decades of data cannot be ignored: African American adults are far more likely to develop Type 2 diabetes than white adults. But has science gone so far in racializing diabetes as to undermine the search for solutions? In a rousing indictment of the idea that notions of biological race should drive scientific inquiry, Sweetness in the Blood provides an ethnographic picture of biotechnology’s framings of Type 2 diabetes risk and race and, importantly, offers a critical examination of the assumptions behind the recruitment of African American and African-descent populations for Type 2 diabetes research.James Doucet-Battle begins with a historical overview of how diabetes has been researched and framed racially over the past century, chronicling one company’s efforts to recruit African Americans to test their new diabetes risk-score algorithm with the aim of increasing the clinical and market value of the firm’s technology. He considers African American reticence about participation in biomedical research and examines race and health disparities in light of advances in genomic sequencing technology. Doucet-Battle concludes by emphasizing that genomic research into sub-Saharan ancestry in fact underlines the importance of analyzing gender before attempting to understand the notion of race. No disease reveals this more than Type 2 diabetes.Sweetness in the Blood challenges the notion that the best approach to understanding, managing, and curing Type 2 diabetes is through the lens of race. It also transforms how we think about sugar, filling a neglected gap between the sugar- and molasses-sweetened past of the enslaved African laborer and the high-fructose corn syrup- and corporate-fed body of the contemporary consumer-laborer.

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Bringing the word sustainability back from the brink of cliché—to a substantive, truly sustainable future Is sustainability a hopelessly vague word, with meager purpose aside from a feel-good appeal to the consumer? In The Three Sustainabilities, Allan Stoekl seeks to (re)valorize the word, for a simple reason: it is useful. Sustainability designates objects in time, their birth or genesis, their consistency, their survival, their demise. And it raises the question, as no other word does, of the role of humans in the survival of a world that is quickly disappearing—and perhaps in the genesis of another world. Stoekl considers a range of possibilities for the word, touching upon questions of object ontology, psychoanalysis, urban critique, technocracy, and religion. He argues that there are three varieties of sustainability, seen from philosophical, cultural, and economic perspectives. One involves the self-sustaining world “without us”; another, the world under our control, which can run the political spectrum from corporatism to Marxism to the Green New Deal; and a third that carries a social and communitarian charge, an energy of the “universe” affirmed through, among other things, meditation and gifting. Each of these carves out a different space in the relations between objects, humans, and their survival and degradation. Each is necessary, unavoidable, and intimately bound with, and infinitely distant from, the others.Along the way, Stoekl cites a wide range of authors, from philosophers to social thinkers, literary theorists to criminologists, anthropologists to novelists. This beautifully written, compelling, and nuanced book is a must for anyone interested in questions of ecology, energy, the environmental humanities, contemporary theories of the object, postmodern and posthuman aesthetics, or religion and the sacred in relation to community.

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Bringing the word sustainability back from the brink of cliché—to a substantive, truly sustainable future Is sustainability a hopelessly vague word, with meager purpose aside from a feel-good appeal to the consumer? In The Three Sustainabilities, Allan Stoekl seeks to (re)valorize the word, for a simple reason: it is useful. Sustainability designates objects in time, their birth or genesis, their consistency, their survival, their demise. And it raises the question, as no other word does, of the role of humans in the survival of a world that is quickly disappearing—and perhaps in the genesis of another world. Stoekl considers a range of possibilities for the word, touching upon questions of object ontology, psychoanalysis, urban critique, technocracy, and religion. He argues that there are three varieties of sustainability, seen from philosophical, cultural, and economic perspectives. One involves the self-sustaining world “without us”; another, the world under our control, which can run the political spectrum from corporatism to Marxism to the Green New Deal; and a third that carries a social and communitarian charge, an energy of the “universe” affirmed through, among other things, meditation and gifting. Each of these carves out a different space in the relations between objects, humans, and their survival and degradation. Each is necessary, unavoidable, and intimately bound with, and infinitely distant from, the others.Along the way, Stoekl cites a wide range of authors, from philosophers to social thinkers, literary theorists to criminologists, anthropologists to novelists. This beautifully written, compelling, and nuanced book is a must for anyone interested in questions of ecology, energy, the environmental humanities, contemporary theories of the object, postmodern and posthuman aesthetics, or religion and the sacred in relation to community.

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Bringing to the fore the voices of Maya authors and what their poetry tells us about resistance, sovereignty, trauma, and regeneration In 1954, Guatemala suffered a coup d’etat, resulting in a decades-long civil war. During this period, Indigenous Mayans were subject to displacement, disappearance, and extrajudicial killing. Within the context of the armed conflict and the postwar period in Guatemala, K’iche’ Maya scholar Emil’ Keme identifies three historical phases of Indigenous Maya literary insurgency in which Maya authors use poetry to dignify their distinct cultural, political, gender, sexual, and linguistic identities.Le Maya Q’atzij / Our Maya Word employs Indigenous and decolonial theoretical frameworks to critically analyze poetic works written by ten contemporary Maya writers from five different Maya nations in Iximulew/Guatemala. Similar to other Maya authors throughout colonial history, these authors and their poetry criticize, in their own creative ways, the continuing colonial assaults to their existence by the nation-state. Throughout, Keme displays the decolonial potentialities and shortcomings proposed by each Maya writer, establishing a new and productive way of understanding Maya living realities and their emancipatory challenges in Iximulew/Guatemala.This innovative work shows how Indigenous Maya poetics carries out various processes of decolonization and, especially, how Maya literature offers diverse and heterogeneous perspectives about what it means to be Maya in the contemporary world.

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A pioneering systematic inquiry into—and mapping of—the field of media and organization Media organize things into patterns and relations. As intermediaries among people and between people and worlds, media shape sociotechnical orders. At the same time, media are organized: while they condition different organizational forms and processes, they, too, are formed and can be re-formed. This intimate relation of media and organizing is timeless. Yet arguably, digital media technologies repose the question of organization—and thus of power and domination, control and surveillance, disruption and emancipation. Bringing together leading media thinkers and organization theorists, this book interrogates organization as an effect and condition of media. How can we understand the recursive relation between media and organization? How can we think, explore, critique, and perhaps alter the organizational bodies and scripts that shape contemporary life?Organize will be of interest to scholars and students of new and old media, social organization, and technology. Moreover, the dialogical form of these essays provides a concise and path-breaking view on the recursive relation between technological media and social organization. The book therefore establishes and maps “media and organization” as a highly relevant field of inquiry, appealing to those with a critical interest in the technological conditioning of the social.

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A family gradually moves forward after the loss of a child—a story for readers of all ages When someone you love dies, you know what doesn’t die? Love. On the hot beach, among colorful umbrellas blooming beneath a bright sun, no one saw a little girl walk into the water. Now, many months later, her bedroom remains empty, her drawers hold her clothes, her pillows and sheets still have her scent, and her mother and father, brothers and sister carry her in their hearts, along with their grief, which takes up so much space. Then one snowy day, the mother and father ask the girl’s older brother, “Would you like a room of your own?” He wants to know, “Whose?” They say, “Your sister’s.”Tenderly, and with refreshing authenticity, beloved Minnesota writer Kao Kalia Yang tells the story of a Hmong American family living with loss and tremendous love. Her direct and poignant words are accompanied by the evocative and expressive drawings of Hmong American artist Xee Reiter. The Shared Room brings a message of comfort and hope to readers young and old.

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A playful picture-book tour of the Swedish alphabet, in which curious characters explore the American Swedish Institute A is for “Akta dig! Look out!” And when you do, you’ll see the nyckelharpa, or keyed fiddle, that Axel’s father made—which followed Axel from Sweden to America. You’ll also find Axel, a snappy dresser, with his umbrella and bowler hat. He’s one of the inquisitive characters who will accompany you on these pages, guiding you through the twenty-nine letters of the Swedish alphabet. Each letter does something exciting. C is “Cirkulera! Go round and round!” And for D, “Dansa! Dance!”This fun introduction to the Swedish alphabet, a romp from A to Z (and then Å to Ä to Ö), is also a delightful tour of the American Swedish Institute in Minneapolis, a cultural center alive with stories past and present. Artifacts from the museum’s collection are charmingly rendered in watercolor and animated by whimsical pen-and-ink characters that draw readers from page to page. Tara Sweeney and Nate Christopherson, a mother and son collaborative team, create magical realism in A to Zåäö, their first picture book. Their irreverent curiosity delights and begs a timeless question—how can exploration and discovery help us grow?

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WInner of the Best First Book from the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association Winner of the Labriola Center American Indian National Book Award Winner of the Ann Saddlemyer Award from the Canadian Association for Theatre ResearchReimagining how we understand and write about the Indigenous listening experience​Hungry Listening is the first book to consider listening from both Indigenous and settler colonial perspectives. A critical response to what has been called the “whiteness of sound studies,” Dylan Robinson evaluates how decolonial practices of listening emerge from increasing awareness of our listening positionality. This, he argues, involves identifying habits of settler colonial perception and contending with settler colonialism’s “tin ear” that renders silent the epistemic foundations of Indigenous song as history, law, and medicine. With case studies on Indigenous participation in classical music, musicals, and popular music, Hungry Listening examines structures of inclusion that reinforce Western musical values. Alongside this inquiry on the unmarked terms of inclusion in performing arts organizations and compositional practice, Hungry Listening offers examples of “doing sovereignty” in Indigenous performance art, museum exhibition, and gatherings that support an Indigenous listening resurgence.Throughout the book, Robinson shows how decolonial and resurgent forms of listening might be affirmed by writing otherwise about musical experience. Through event scores, dialogic improvisation, and forms of poetic response and refusal, he demands a reorientation toward the act of reading as a way of listening. Indigenous relationships to the life of song are here sustained in writing that finds resonance in the intersubjective experience between listener, sound, and space.

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A study of how film has continually intervened in our sense of perception, with far-ranging insights into the current state of lived experience How has cinema transformed our senses, and how does it continue to do so? Positing film as a stage in the long coevolution of human consciousness and visual technology, Postcinematic Vision offer a fresh perspective on the history of film while providing startling new insights into the so-called divide between cinematic and digital media.Starting with the argument that film viewing has long altered neural circuitry in our brains, Roger F. Cook proceeds to reevaluate film’s origins, as well as its merger with digital imaging in the 1990s. His animating argument is that film has continually altered the relation between media and human perception, challenging the visual nature of modern culture in favor of a more unified, pan-sensual way of perceiving. Through this approach, he makes original contributions to our understanding of how mediation is altering lived experience.Along the way, Cook provides important reevaluations of well-known figures such as Franz Kafka, closely reading cinematic passages in the great author’s work; he reassesses the conventional wisdom that Marshall McLuhan was a technological determinist; and he lodges an original new reading of The Matrix. Full of provocative and far-reaching ideas, Postcinematic Vision is a powerful work that helps us see old concepts anew while providing new ideas for future investigation.

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The dread, the drama, and the hope of a break in one of the country’s oldest active missing-child investigations On a cold November afternoon in 1951, three young boys went out to play in Farview Park in north Minneapolis. The Klein brothers—Kenneth Jr., 8; David, 6; and Danny, 4—never came home. When two caps turned up on the ice of the Mississippi River, investigators concluded that the boys had drowned and closed the case. The boys’ parents were unconvinced, hoping against hope that their sons would still be found. Sixty long years would pass before two sheriff’s deputies, with new information in hand and the FBI on board, could convince the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension to reopen the case.This is the story of that decades-long ordeal, one of the oldest known active missing-child investigations, told by a writer whose own research for an article in 1998 sparked new interest in the boys’ disappearance. Beginning in 2012, when deputies Jessica Miller and Lance Salls took up the Kleins’ cause, author Jack El-Hai returns to the mountain of clues amassed through the years, then follows the trail traced over time by the boys’ indefatigable parents, right back to those critical moments in 1951. Told in brisk, longform journalism style, The Lost Brothers captures the Kleins’ initial terror and confusion but also the unstinting effort, with its underlying faith, that carried them from psychics to reporters to private investigators and TV producers—and ultimately produced results that cast doubt on the drowning verdict and even suggested possible suspects in the boys’ abduction. An intimate portrait of a parent’s worst nightmare and its terrible toll on a family, the book is also a genuine mystery, spinning out suspense at every missed turn or potential lead, along with its hope for resolution in the end.

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