Download or read book Spaces of Crisis and Critique written by Anthony Faramelli and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2018-09-20 with total page 176 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Of Other Spaces Foucault coined the term “heterotopias” to signify “all the other real sites that can be found within the culture" which "are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted.” For Foucault, heterotopic spaces were first of all spaces of crisis, or transformative spaces, however these have given way to heterotopias of deviation and spaces of discipline, such as psychiatric hospitals or prisons. Foucault's essay provokes us to think through how spaces of crisis and critique function to open up disruptive, subversive or minoritarian fields within philosophical, political, cultural or aesthetic discourses. This book takes this interdisciplinary and international approach to the spatial, challenging existing borders, boundaries, and horizons; from Claire Colebrook's chapter unpacking the heterotopic spaces of America and Mexico that lie beyond reductive ideological spaces of light and darkness, to a Foucauldian reading of the Zapatista resistance. With essays on politics, philosophy, literature, post-colonial studies, and aesthetics from established and emerging academics, this book answers Foucault's call to give us a better understanding of our present cultural epoch.

Download or read book Critique and Praxis written by Bernard E. Harcourt and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2020-08-11 with total page 730 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Critical philosophy has always challenged the division between theory and practice. At its best, it aims to turn contemplation into emancipation, seeking to transform society in pursuit of equality, autonomy, and human flourishing. Yet today’s critical theory often seems to engage only in critique. These times of crisis demand more. Bernard E. Harcourt challenges us to move beyond decades of philosophical detours and to harness critical thought to the need for action. In a time of increasing awareness of economic and social inequality, Harcourt calls on us to make society more equal and just. Only critical theory can guide us toward a more self-reflexive pursuit of justice. Charting a vision for political action and social transformation, Harcourt argues that instead of posing the question, “What is to be done?” we must now turn it back onto ourselves and ask, and answer, “What more am I to do?” Critique and Praxis advocates for a new path forward that constantly challenges each and every one of us to ask what more we can do to realize a society based on equality and justice. Joining his decades of activism, social-justice litigation, and political engagement with his years of critical theory and philosophical work, Harcourt has written a magnum opus.

Download or read book Critique and Crisis written by Reinhart Koselleck and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2000-03-13 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Critique and Crisis established Reinhart Koselleck's reputation as the most important German intellectual historian of the postwar period. This first English translation of Koselleck's tour de force demonstrates a chronological breadth, a philosophical depth, and an originality which are hardly equalled in any scholarly domain. It is a history of the Enlightenment in miniature, fundamental to our understanding of that period and its consequences. Like Tocqueville, Koselleck views Enlightenment intellectuals as an uprooted, unrealistic group of onlookers who sowed the seeds of the modern political tensions that first flowered in the French Revolution. He argues that it was the split that developed between state and society during the Enlightenment that fostered the emergence of this intellectual elite divorced from the realities of politics. Koselleck describes how this disjunction between political authority proper and its subjects led to private spheres that later became centers of moral authority and, eventually, models for political society that took little or no notice of the constraints under which politicians must inevitably work. In this way progressive bourgeois philosophy, which seemed to offer the promise of a unified and peaceful world, in fact produced just the opposite. The book provides a wealth of examples drawn from all of Europe to illustrate the still relevant message that we evade the constraints and the necessities of the political realm at our own risk. Critique and Crisis is included in the series Studies in Contemporary German Social Thought, edited by Thomas McCarthy.

Download or read book Crisis and Critique written by Rodrigo Cordero and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-07-15 with total page 199 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Fragility is a condition that inhabits the foundations of social life. It remains mostly unnoticed until something breaks and dislocates the sense of completion. In such moments of rupture, the social world reveals the stuff of which it is made and how it actually works; it opens itself to question. Based on this claim, this book reconsiders the place of the notions of crisis and critique as fundamental means to grasp the fragile condition of the social and challenges the normalization and dissolution of these ‘concepts’ in contemporary social theory. It draws on fundamental insights from Hegel, Marx, and Adorno as to recover the importance of the critique of concepts for the critique of society, and engages in a series of studies on the work of Habermas, Koselleck, Arendt, and Foucault as to consider anew the relationship of crisis and critique as immanent to the political and economic forms of modernity. Moving from crisis to critique and from critique to crisis, the book shows that fragility is a price to be paid for accepting the relational constitution of the social world as a human domain without secure foundations, but also for wishing to break free from all attempts at giving closure to social life as an identity without question. This book will engage students of sociology, political theory and social philosophy alike.

Download or read book Languages of Resistance Transformation and Futurity in Mediterranean Crisis Scapes written by Maria Boletsi and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2020-09-01 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection rethinks crisis in relation to critique through the prism of various declared ‘crises’ in the Mediterranean: the refugee crisis, the Eurozone crisis, the Greek debt crisis, the Arab Spring, the Palestinian question, and others. With contributions from cultural, literary, film, and migration studies and sociology, this book shifts attention from Europe to the Mediterranean as a site not only of intersecting crises, but a breeding ground for new cultures of critique, visions of futurity, and radical imaginaries shaped through or against frameworks of crisis. If crisis rhetoric today serves populist, xenophobic or anti-democratic agendas, can the concept crisis still do the work of critique or partake in transformative languages by scholars, artists, and activists? Or should we forge different vocabularies to understand present realities? This collection explores alternative mobilizations of crisis and forms of art, cinema, literature, and cultural practices across the Mediterranean that disengage from dominant crisis narratives. Chapter 1 is available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.

Download or read book Un timely Crises written by Maria Boletsi and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2021-08-09 with total page 107 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Un)timely Crises explores how ‘crisis’—as a narrative, concept, grammar, and experience—structures time and space. This collectively written volume extends Bakhtin’s ‘chronotope’ to challenge mobilizations of crisis within neoliberal governmentality. The book explores how contemporary crises can trigger memories and traumas of earlier events as well as foster practices of resistance and alternative visions of the future. Drawing from across disciplines and geographical contexts, (Un)timely Crises reimagines the relation of ‘crisis’ with ‘critique’, proposing future trajectories for thinking and living in and through crisis.

Download or read book Rupture written by Manuel Castells and published by Polity. This book was released on 2018-12-03 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The majority of citizens in the world today do not trust their political representatives, the mainstream political parties, the established political institutions or their governments. This widespread crisis of legitimacy underlies a series of dramatic changes that have taken place in recent times in the global political landscape, such as the unexpected election of Donald Trump, Brexit, the demise of traditional political parties and the election of a political outsider in France, the transformation of the political system in Spain (including the secessionist movement in Catalonia), the rise of the extreme right in Europe and the nationalist challenges that threaten the European Union. In this short but wide-ranging book Manuel Castells analyses each of these processes and examines some of the potential causes of people’s disaffection towards the institutions of liberal democracy, including the effects of globalization, the impact of media politics and the internet, the increasing corruption of politicians, the insulation of a professional political class from civil society and the critique of the existing order by new social movements. He also examines the impact of global terrorism and war on the xenophobia and racism that are fuelling the surge of extremism among a growing proportion of the population. The fact that many of these trends are present in very different contexts suggests that we are witnessing a deep-seated crisis of the model of democracy that has been the cornerstone of stability and civility in the last half century.

Download or read book Crisis and Critique written by Anne Kaun and published by Zed Books Ltd.. This book was released on 2016-09-15 with total page 134 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Throughout history, innovations in media have had a profound impact on protest and dissent. But while these recent developments in social media have been the subject of intense scholarly attention, there has been little consideration of the wider historical role of media technologies in protest. Drawing on the work of key theorists such as Walter Benjamin and Raymond Williams, Crisis and Critique provides a historical analysis of media practices within the context of major economic crises. Through richly detailed case studies of the movements which emerged during three different economic crises – the unemployed workers' movement of the Great Depression, the rent strike movement of the early 1970s and the Occupy Wall Street protests which followed the recession of 2007 – Kaun provides an in-depth analysis of the cultural, economic and social consequences of media technologies, and their role in shaping and facilitating resistance to capitalism.

Download or read book Heterotopia and the City written by Michiel Dehaene and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2008-05-15 with total page 572 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Heterotopia, literally meaning ‘other place’, is a rich concept in urban design that describes a space that is on the margins of ordered or civil society, and one that possesses multiple, fragmented or even incompatible meanings. The term has had an impact on architectural and urban theory since it was coined by Foucault in the late 1960s but it has remained a source of confusion and debate since. Heterotopia and the City seeks to clarify this concept and investigates the heterotopias which exist throughout our contemporary world: in museums, theme parks, malls, holiday resorts, gated communities, wellness hotels and festival markets. With theoretical contributions on the concept of heterotopia, including a new translation of Foucault’s influential 1967 text, Of Other Space and essays by well-known scholars, the book comprises a series of critical case studies, from Beaubourg to Bilbao, which probe a range of (post)urban transformations and which redirect the debate on the privatization of public space. Wastelands and terrains vagues are studied in detail in a section on urban activism and transgression and the reader gets a glimpse of the extremes of our dualized, postcivil condition through case studies on Jakarta, Dubai, and Kinshasa. Heterotopia and the City provides a collective effort to reposition heterotopia as a crucial concept for contemporary urban theory. The book will be of interest to all those wishing to understand the city in the emerging postcivil society and post-historical era. Planners, architects, cultural theorists, urbanists and academics will find this a valuable contribution to current critical argument.

Download or read book The U S Immigration Crisis written by Miguel A. De La Torre and published by Wipf and Stock Publishers. This book was released on 2016-06-17 with total page 197 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The current immigration crisis on our southern borders is usually debated from a safe distance. Politicians create a fear of the migrant to garner votes, while academicians pontificate on the topic from the comfort of cushy armchairs. What would happen if instead the issue were explored with one's feet on the ground--what the author calls an "ethics of place"? As an organic intellectual, De La Torre writes while physically standing in solidarity with migrants who are crossing borders and the humanitarian organizations that accompany them in their journey. He painstakingly captures their stories, testimonies, and actions, which become the foundation for theological and ethical analysis. From this vantage point, the book constructs a liberative ethics based on what those disenfranchised by our current immigration policies are saying and doing in the hopes of not just raising consciousness, but also crafting possibilities for participatory praxis.

Download or read book The Sputniks Crisis and Early United States Space Policy written by Rip Bulkeley and published by Springer. This book was released on 1991-06-18 with total page 298 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An examination of American space policy in the 12 years after World War II and in particular of the reaction provoked by the launching of the first Sputnik satellite in 1957. In the author's opinion the truth of what occurred in this period has been clouded by confusion and misinformation.

Download or read book The New Twenty Years Crisis written by Philip Cunliffe and published by McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP. This book was released on 2020-09-01 with total page 151 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The liberal order is decaying. Will it survive, and if not, what will replace it? On the eightieth anniversary of the publication of E.H. Carr's The Twenty Years' Crisis, 1919-1939, Philip Cunliffe revisits this classic text, juxtaposing its claims with contemporary debates on the rise and fall of the liberal international order. The New Twenty Years' Crisis reveals that the liberal international order experienced a twenty-year cycle of decline from 1999 to 2019. In contrast to claims that the order has been undermined by authoritarian challengers, Cunliffe argues that the primary drivers of the crisis are internal. He shows that the heavily ideological international relations theory that has developed since the end of the Cold War is clouded by utopianism, replacing analysis with aspiration and expressing the interests of power rather than explaining its functioning. As a result, a growing tendency to discount political alternatives has made us less able to adapt to political change. In search of a solution, this book argues that breaking through the current impasse will require not only dissolving the new forms of utopianism, but also pushing past the fear that the twenty-first century will repeat the mistakes of the twentieth. Only then can we finally escape the twenty years' crisis. By reflecting on Carr's foundational work, The New Twenty Years' Crisis offers an opportunity to take stock of the current state of international order and international relations theory.

Download or read book The Crisis of Expertise written by Gil Eyal and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2019-10-24 with total page 135 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In recent political debates there has been a significant change in the valence of the word “experts” from a superlative to a near pejorative, typically accompanied by a recitation of experts’ many failures and misdeeds. In topics as varied as Brexit, climate change, and vaccinations there is a palpable mistrust of experts and a tendency to dismiss their advice. Are we witnessing, therefore, the “death of expertise,” or is the handwringing about an “assault on science” merely the hysterical reaction of threatened elites? In this new book, Gil Eyal argues that what needs to be explained is not a one-sided “mistrust of experts” but the two-headed pushmi-pullyu of unprecedented reliance on science and expertise, on the one hand, coupled with increased skepticism and dismissal of scientific findings and expert opinion, on the other. The current mistrust of experts is best understood as one more spiral in an on-going, recursive crisis of legitimacy. The “scientization of politics,” of which critics warned in the 1960s, has brought about a politicization of science, and the two processes reinforce one another in an unstable, crisis-prone mixture. This timely book will be of great interest to students and scholars in the social sciences and to anyone concerned about the political uses of, and attacks on, scientific knowledge and expertise.

Download or read book Crisis Under Critique written by Didier Fassin and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2022-04-13 with total page 711 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The word “crisis” denotes a break, a discontinuity, a rupture—a moment after which the normal order can continue no longer. Yet our political vocabulary today is suffused with the rhetoric of crisis, to the point that supposed abnormalities have been normalized. How can the notion of crisis be rethought in order to take stock of—and challenge—our understanding of the many predicaments in which we find ourselves? Instead of diagnosing emergencies, Didier Fassin, Axel Honneth, and an assembly of leading thinkers examine how people experience, interpret, and contribute to the making of and the response to critical situations. Contributors inquire into the social production of crisis, evaluating a wide range of cases on five continents through the lenses of philosophy, sociology, anthropology, political science, history, and economics. Considering social movements, intellectual engagements, affected communities, and reflexive perspectives, the book foregrounds the perspectives of those most closely involved, bringing out the immediacy of crisis. Featuring analysis from below as well as above, from the inside as well as the outside, Crisis Under Critique is a singular intervention that utterly recasts one of today’s most crucial—yet most ambiguous—concepts.

Download or read book Critical Theory and Social Transformation written by Gerard Delanty and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-02-24 with total page 379 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Critical Theory and Social Transformation provides an exploration of the major themes in critical social theory of recent years. Delanty argues that a critical theory perspective can offer much-needed insights into the pressing socio-political challenges of our time. In this volume, he advances the need to reconnect social theory and social research and to return to the foundational concerns of critical social theory. Delanty engages with the key topics facing critical social theorists: capitalism, cosmopolitanism, modernity, the Anthropocene, and legacies of history. The connecting thread is that the topics are all contemporary challenges for critical theory and relate to major social transformations. The notions of critique, crisis, and social transformation are central to the book. Critical Theory and Social Transformation will be of interest to the broad readership in social and political theory. It will appeal to those working in sociology, political sociology, politics, and international studies and to anyone with an interest in any of the chapter-specific topics, such as public space, memory, and neo-authoritarianism.

Download or read book The Endless Crisis written by John Bellamy Foster and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2012-09-01 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The days of boom and bubble are over, and the time has come to understand the long-term economic reality. Although the Great Recession officially ended in June 2009, hopes for a new phase of rapid economic expansion were quickly dashed. Instead, growth has been slow, unemployment has remained high, wages and benefits have seen little improvement, poverty has increased, and the trend toward more inequality of incomes and wealth has continued. It appears that the Great Recession has given way to a period of long-term anemic growth, which Foster and McChesney aptly term the Great Stagnation. This incisive and timely book traces the origins of economic stagnation and explains what it means for a clear understanding of our current situation. The authors point out that increasing monopolization of the economy—when a handful of large firms dominate one or several industries—leads to an over-abundance of capital and too few profitable investment opportunities, with economic stagnation as the result. Absent powerful stimuli to investment, such as historic innovations like the automobile or major government spending, modern capitalist economies have become increasingly dependent on the financial sector to realize profits. And while financialization may have provided a temporary respite from stagnation, it is a solution that cannot last indefinitely, as instability in financial markets over the last half-decade has made clear.

Download or read book Down to Earth written by Bruno Latour and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2018-11-26 with total page 140 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The present ecological mutation has organized the whole political landscape for the last thirty years. This could explain the deadly cocktail of exploding inequalities, massive deregulation, and conversion of the dream of globalization into a nightmare for most people. What holds these three phenomena together is the conviction, shared by some powerful people, that the ecological threat is real and that the only way for them to survive is to abandon any pretense at sharing a common future with the rest of the world. Hence their flight offshore and their massive investment in climate change denial. The Left has been slow to turn its attention to this new situation. It is still organized along an axis that goes from investment in local values to the hope of globalization and just at the time when, everywhere, people dissatisfied with the ideal of modernity are turning back to the protection of national or even ethnic borders. This is why it is urgent to shift sideways and to define politics as what leads toward the Earth and not toward the global or the national. Belonging to a territory is the phenomenon most in need of rethinking and careful redescription; learning new ways to inhabit the Earth is our biggest challenge. Bringing us down to earth is the task of politics today.