This book explores activism, research and critique in the age of digital subjects and objects and Big Data capitalism after a digital turn said to have radically transformed our political futures. Optimists assert that the ‘digital' promises: new forms of community and ways of knowing and sensing, innovation, participatory culture, networked activism, and distributed democracy. Pessimists…
Death of the PostHuman undertakes a series of critical encounters with the legacy of what had come to be known as 'theory,' and its contemporary supposedly post-human aftermath. There can be no redemptive post-human future in which the myopia and anthropocentrism of the species finds an exit and manages to emerge with ecology and life. At the same time, what has come to be known as the human - …
In Toward a Pragmatist Sociology, Robert Dunn explores the relationship between the ideas and principles of philosopher and educator John Dewey and sociologist C. Wright Mills to provide a philosophical and theoretical foundation for the development of a critical and public sociology. Dunn recovers an intellectual and conceptual framework for transforming sociology into a more substantive, comp…
The anticommunist crusade of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and its legendary director J. Edgar Hoover during the McCarthy era and the Cold War has attracted much attention from historians during the last decades, but little has been known about the Bureau's political activities during its formative years. This work breaks new ground by tracing the roots of the FBI's political surveillance…
Capital at the Brink reveals the pervasiveness, destructiveness, and dominance of neoliberalism within American society and culture. The contributors to this collection also offer points of resistance to an ideology wherein, to borrow Henry Giroux’s comment, “everything either is for sale or is plundered for profit.” The first step in fighting neoliberalism is to make it visible. By discu…
Every day in Mumbai 5,000 dabbawalas (literally translated as "those who carry boxes") distribute a staggering 200,000 home-cooked lunchboxes to the city’s workers and students. Giving employment and status to thousands of largely illiterate villagers from Mumbai's hinterland, this co-operative has been in operation since the late nineteenth century. It provides one of the most efficient deli…
This volume offers a fresh perspective on the copy and the practice of copying, two topics that, while the focus of much academic discussion in recent decades, have been underrepresented in the discourse on transculturality. Here, experts from a wide range of academic disciplines present their views on the copy from a transcultural perspective, seeking not to define the copy uniformly, but to r…
Drawing on a number of paradigmatic works of art, the book explores the motif of ‘gypsy’ child-theft and its visualisations. The analytical focus is on the colour coding of bodies in texts and images and their racialised/anti-gypsy uses. Offering a comprehensive survey of the motif’s adaptations to different visual media, the author elaborates on its multiple layers of meaning and functio…
Fallgirls provides an analysis of the abuses that took place at Abu Ghraib in terms of social theory, gender and power, based on first-hand participant-observations of the courts-martials of Lynndie England and Sabrina Harman. This book examines the trials themselves, including interactions with soldiers and defense teams, documents pertaining to the courts-martials, US government reports and p…