Download or read book Conflicting Humanities written by Rosi Braidotti and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2016-06-30 with total page 307 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How might we reinvent the humanities? This is the question at the heart of this provocative volume. It is a difficult mission and definitely one which needs to be addressed with increasing urgency. There is no better cast to confront and problematize this question than the contributors to Conflicting Humanities. They are world-renowned thinkers who can tackle the problem as researchers and teachers but also as prominent public intellectuals. Taking the intellectual and political legacies of Edward Said as a point of departure and frame of reference, the contributors – working in a range of disciplinary settings – consider the current condition of humanism and the humanities. Said's definition of the core task of the Humanities as the pursuit of democratic criticism remains more urgent than ever, though it needs to be supplemented by gender, environmental, and anti-racist perspectives as well as by detailed analysis of the necro-political governmentality of our time. An innovative piece of scholarship, this volume is committed to the refusal of a world riven by new kinds of warcraft, injustice and exploitation.
Download or read book Conflicting Humanities written by Rosi Braidotti and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2016-06-30 with total page 307 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How might we reinvent the humanities? This is the question at the heart of this provocative volume. It is a difficult mission and definitely one which needs to be addressed with increasing urgency. There is no better cast to confront and problematize this question than the contributors to Conflicting Humanities. They are world-renowned thinkers who can tackle the problem as researchers and teachers but also as prominent public intellectuals. Taking the intellectual and political legacies of Edward Said as a point of departure and frame of reference, the contributors – working in a range of disciplinary settings – consider the current condition of humanism and the humanities. Said's definition of the core task of the Humanities as the pursuit of democratic criticism remains more urgent than ever, though it needs to be supplemented by gender, environmental, and anti-racist perspectives as well as by detailed analysis of the necro-political governmentality of our time. An innovative piece of scholarship, this volume is committed to the refusal of a world riven by new kinds of warcraft, injustice and exploitation.
Download or read book Undisciplining Knowledge written by Harvey J. Graff and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2015-08-01 with total page 343 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first critical history of interdisciplinary efforts and movements in the modern university. Interdisciplinarity—or the interrelationships among distinct fields, disciplines, or branches of knowledge in pursuit of new answers to pressing problems—is one of the most contested topics in higher education today. Some see it as a way to break down the silos of academic departments and foster creative interchange, while others view it as a destructive force that will diminish academic quality and destroy the university as we know it. In Undisciplining Knowledge, acclaimed scholar Harvey J. Graff presents readers with the first comparative and critical history of interdisciplinary initiatives in the modern university. Arranged chronologically, the book tells the engaging story of how various academic fields both embraced and fought off efforts to share knowledge with other scholars. It is a story of myths, exaggerations, and misunderstandings, on all sides. Touching on a wide variety of disciplines—including genetic biology, sociology, the humanities, communications, social relations, operations research, cognitive science, materials science, nanotechnology, cultural studies, literacy studies, and biosciences—the book examines the ideals, theories, and practices of interdisciplinarity through comparative case studies. Graff interweaves this narrative with a social, institutional, and intellectual history of interdisciplinary efforts over the 140 years of the modern university, focusing on both its implementation and evolution while exploring substantial differences in definitions, goals, institutional locations, and modes of organization across different areas of focus. Scholars across the disciplines, specialists in higher education, administrators, and interested readers will find the book’s multiple perspectives and practical advice on building and operating—and avoiding fallacies and errors—in interdisciplinary research and education invaluable.
Download or read book A Feminist Companion to the Posthumanities written by Cecilia Åsberg and published by Springer. This book was released on 2018-05-17 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This companion is a cutting-edge primer to critical forms of the posthumanities and the feminist posthumanities, aimed at students and researchers who want to catch up with the recent theoretical developments in various fields in the humanities, such as new media studies, gender studies, cultural studies, science and technology studies, human animal studies, postcolonial critique, philosophy and environmental humanities. It contains a collection of nineteen new and original short chapters introducing influential concepts, ideas and approaches that have shaped and developed new materialism, inhuman theory, critical posthumanism, feminist materialism, and posthuman philosophy. A resource for students and teachers, this comprehensive volume brings together established international scholars and emerging theorists, for timely and astute definitions of a moving target – posthuman humanities and feminist posthumanities.
Download or read book The Politics of Literature in a Divided 21st Century written by Katharina Donn and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-04-23 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How does literature matter politically in the 21st century? This book offers an ecocritical framework for exploring the significance of literature today. Featuring a diverse body of texts and authors, it develops a future-oriented politics embedded in those transgressive realities which our political system finds impossible to tame. This book re-imagines political agency, voices, bodies and borders as transformative processes rather than rigid realities, articulating a ‘dia-topian’ literary politics. Taking a contextual approach, it addresses such urgent global issues as biopolitics, migration and borders, populism, climate change, and terrorism. These readings revitalize fictional worlds for political enquiry, demonstrating how imaginative literature seeds change in a world of closed-off horizons. Prior to the pragmatics of power-play, literary language breathes new energy into the frames of our thought and the shapes of our affects. This book shows how relation, metamorphosis and enmeshment can become salient in a politics beyond the conflict line.
Download or read book Future Theory written by Marc Botha and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2021-04-08 with total page 480 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: By interrogating the terms and concepts most central to cultural change, Future Theory interrogates how theory can play a central role in dynamic transition. It demonstrates how entangled the highly politicized spheres of cultural production, scientific invention, and intellectual discourse are in the contemporary world and how new concepts and forms of thinking are crucial to embarking upon change. Future Theory is built around five key concepts – boundaries, organization, rupture, novelty, futurity – examined by leading international thinkers to build a vision of how theory can be applied to a constantly shifting world.
Download or read book The Human written by John Lechte and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2018-06-14 with total page 267 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why is it important to consider the human today? Exploring this question John Lechte takes inspiration from the interplay of two of Giorgio Agamben's concepts: 'ways of life' and 'bare life'. Stateless people, those who do not have a political community, such as asylum seekers and refugees, are no less human. However the European tradition, represented most clearly in Hannah Arendt's thinking of the opposition between the oikos, as the satisfaction of basic needs, and the polis, as the realm of freedom and glory, proposes the opposite of this. Arendt's famous phrase, 'the right to have rights', means that freedom and full human potential can only be realised in the context of civil society; in short, that only citizens can be fully human. Because Arendt's view is so influential, yet often not acknowledged, it is necessary to undertake a full investigation of the nature and meaning of the human to establish that it is not reducible to the citizen, but is always characterised by a 'way of life' – life mediated by language. The human is never reducible to 'bare life' – a life with no other significance than physical survival. The implications of 'bare life' are investigated through important themes in relation to the human, such as: freedom and necessity, the animal, animality as nature, inclusion and exclusion in politics, the sacred, death and dying, technics and nature, the Same and the Other, the everyday as extraordinary. Journeying through Agamben, Arendt, Bataille, Derrida, Hegel, Heidegger, Husserl, Levinas, Schelling, Simondon, and Stiegler, this is a profound search to reveal the truly human.
Download or read book Gender and the Abjection of Blackness written by Sabine Broeck and published by SUNY Press. This book was released on 2018-05-23 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An anti-racist critique of gender studies as a field. In Gender and the Abjection of Blackness, Sabine Broeck argues that gender studies as a mostly white field has taken insufficient account of Black contributions, and that more than being an ethnocentric limitation or blind spot, this has represented a structural anti-Blackness in the field. Engaging with the work of Black feminist authors Sylvia Wynter, Hortense Spillers, and Saidiya Hartman, Broeck critiques a selection of canonical white gender studies texts to make this case. The book discusses this problem at the core of gender theory as a practice which Broeck terms enslavismthe ongoing abjection of Black life which Hartman has called the afterlife of slavery. This has become manifest in the repetitive employment of the woman as slave metaphor so central to gender theory, as well as in recent theoretical mutations of these anti-Black politics of analogy. It is the structural separation of Blackness from gender that has functioned over and again as the scaffold enabling white womens struggles for successful recognition of equality and subjectivity in the human world as we know it. This book challenges white readers to rethink their own untroubled identification with gender theory, and it provides all readers with a white feminist theorists sophisticated theoretical and self-critical scholarly account of her own reckoning with and learning in dialogue from Black feminisms critique. Broeck draws on a wide range of experience to provide a frame for rethinking gender as category that can work towards something like Black freedom. Most importantly, Black theoretical insights in this work move beyond intervention to offer a whole new way of being, and the author grapples with the new conceptual terrain she is now occupying. Rinaldo Walcott, author of Queer Returns: Essays on Multiculturalism, Diaspora, and Black Studies
Download or read book Practising Interdisciplinarity written by Babu P. Remesh and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2024-02-09 with total page 293 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines the epistemological, social and political dimensions of practising interdisciplinary approaches to enhance knowledge, pedagogy, and methodological aspects of research in the South Asian context. The volume sets the context by bringing together a range of ideas, questions and reflections on the concept of interdisciplinarity, the numerous waves of interdisciplinarity in contemporary history of knowledge, which were radically different from each other in their epistemological and political orientations. The book revisits the concept of interdisciplinarity and takes into cognizance the importance of the mutual shaping of knowledge and politics in our search for inclusive and sustainable future(s). The book offers a blend of both conceptual and institutional discourses on interdisciplinarity and the personal experiences of leading practitioners, bringing together critical engagements from different vantage points on practising it. It will be of interest to researchers, scholars and practitioners of social sciences and humanities disciplines as well as interdisciplinary fields such as educational studies, development studies, women’s studies, media studies, cultural studies, urban studies, labour studies, legal studies, public health, disability studies, global/international studies and performing arts. It will also be useful for policy planners, development practitioners, activists and social organizers working in related fields.
Download or read book Continental Philosophy and the Palestinian Question written by Zahi Zalloua and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2017-02-23 with total page 239 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From Sartre to Levinas, continental philosophers have looked to the example of the Jew as the paradigmatic object of and model for ethical inquiry. Levinas, for example, powerfully dedicates his 1974 book Otherwise than Being to the victims of the Holocaust, and turns attention to the state of philosophy after Auschwitz. Such an ethics radically challenges prior notions of autonomy and comprehension-two key ideas for traditional ethical theory and, more generally, the Greek tradition. It seeks to respect the opacity of the other and avoid the dangers of hermeneutic violence. But how does such an ethics of the other translate into real, everyday life? What is at stake in thinking the other as Jew? Is the alterity of the Jew simply a counter to Greek universalism? Is a rhetoric of exceptionalism, with its unavoidable ontological residue, at odds with shifting political realities? Within this paradigm, what then becomes of the Arab or Muslim, the other of the Jew, the other of the other, so to speak? This line of ethical thought-in its desire to bear witness to past suffering and come to terms with subjectivity after Auschwitz-arguably brackets from analysis present operations of power. Would, then, a more sensitive historical approach expose the Palestinian as the other of the Israeli? Here, Zahi Zalloua offers a challenging intervention into how we configure the contemporary.
Download or read book Resilient Bodies Residual Effects written by Sandra Noeth and published by transcript Verlag. This book was released on 2019-08-31 with total page 309 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What does it take to cross a border, and what does it take to belong? Sandra Noeth examines the entangled experiences of borders and of collectivity through the perspective of bodies. By dramaturgical analyses of contemporary artistic work from Lebanon and Palestine, Noeth shows how borders and collectivity are constructed and negotiated through performative, corporeal, movement-based, and sensory strategies and processes. This interdisciplinary study is made urgent by social and political transformations across the Middle East and beyond from 2010 onwards. It puts to the fore the residual, body-bound structural effects of borders and of collectivity and proceeds to develop notions of agency and responsibility that are immanently bound to bodies in relation.
Download or read book The Planetary Humanism of European Women s Science Fiction written by Eleanor Drage and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2023-10-09 with total page 263 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Planetary Humanism of European Women’s Science Fiction argues that utopian science fiction written by European women has, since the seventeenth century, played an important role in exploring the racial and gender possibilities of the outer limits of the humanist imagination. This book focuses on six works of science fiction from the UK, France, Spain, and Italy: Jennifer Marie Brissett’s Elysium; Nicoletta Vallorani’s Sulla Sabbia di Sur and Il Cuore Finto di DR; Aliette de Bodard’s Xuya Universe series; Elia Barcelo’s Consecuencias Naturales; and Historias del Crazy Bar, a collection of stories by Lola Robles and Maria Concepcion Regueiro. It sets these in conversation with key gender and critical race scholars: Judith Butler, Rosi Braidotti, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Paul Gilroy, and Jack Halberstam. It asserts that a key concern for feminism, anti- racism, and science fiction now is to seek inventive ways of returning to the question of the human in the context of increasing racial and gender divisions. Offering unique access to contemporary and historical women writers who have mobilised the utopian imagination to rethink the human, this book is of use to those conducting research in Gender Studies, Philosophy, History, and Literature.
Download or read book Thinking with Balibar written by Ann Laura Stoler and published by Fordham University Press. This book was released on 2020-07-07 with total page 329 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume, the first sustained critical work on the French political philosopher Étienne Balibar, collects essays by sixteen prominent philosophers, psychoanalysts, anthropologists, sociologists, and literary critics who each identify, define, and explore a central concept in Balibar’s thought. The result is a hybrid lexicon-engagement that makes clear the depth and importance of Balibar’s contribution to the most urgent topics in contemporary thought. The book shows the continuing vitality of materialist thought across the humanities and social sciences and will be fundamental for understanding the philosophical bases of the contemporary left critique of globalization, neoliberalism, and the articulation of race, racism, and economic exploitation. Contributors: Emily Apter, Étienne Balbar, J. M. Bernstein, Judith Butler, Monique David-Ménard, Hanan Elsayed, Didier Fassin, Stathis Gourgouris, Bernard E. Harcourt, Jacques Lezra, Patrice Maniglier, Warren Montag, Adi Ophir, Bruce Robbins, Ann Laura Stoler, Gary Wilder
Download or read book Science Democracy and Curriculum Studies written by John A. Weaver and published by Springer. This book was released on 2018-08-30 with total page 202 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this book John A. Weaver suggests curriculum studies scholars need to engage more in science matters. It offers a review of science studies writing from Ludwick Fleck and Thomas Kuhn to Philip Mirowski. The volume includes chapters on the rhetoric of science with a focus on the history of rhetoric and economics then on the rhetoric of models, statistics, and data, a critique of neoliberalism and its impact on science policy and the foundations of democracy, Harry Collin’s and Robert Evans’ theory of expertise followed by chapters on feminism with a focus on the work of Sharon Traweek, Karen Barad, and Vinciane Despret, postcolonial thought, with attention paid to the work of Daniela Bleichmar, Londa Schiebinger, Judith Carney, Sylvia Wynter, Paul Gilroy, and Sandra Harding, and a final chapter on Nietzsche’s philosophy of science. Each section is introduced by an interlude drawing on autobiographical connections between curriculum studies and science studies.
Download or read book Jewish Studies as Counterlife written by Adam Zachary Newton and published by Fordham Univ Press. This book was released on 2019-06-04 with total page 251 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book tells the story of a Jewish Studies that hasn’t fully happened—at least not yet. Newton asks what we mean when we say “Jewish Studies”—and when we imagine it not as mere amalgam but as a project. Jewish Studies offers a unique perspective from which to view the horizon of the academic humanities because, although it arrived belatedly, it has spanned a range of disciplinary locations and configurations, from an “origin story” in nineteenth-century historicism and philology, to the emancipatory politics of the Enlightenment, to the ethnicity-driven pluralism of the postwar decades, to more recent configurations within an interdisciplinary cultural studies. The conflicted allegiances with respect to traditions, disciplines, divisions, stakes, and stakeholders represent the structural and historical situation of the field, as it comes into contact with the humanities more broadly. At once a literary and philosophical thinker, Newton deploys a tableau of texts in concert with an ensemble of vivid, elastic tropes not only to theorize Jewish Studies but also to reimagine it as an agent of that potency Jacques Derrida calls “leverage”—a force multiplier for the field’s multiple possibilities. In refiguring a Jewish Studies to come, the book intervenes in a broader discourse about the challenge of professing disciplinary knowledges while promoting transit across their boundaries. Jewish Studies as Counterlife further amplifies Newton’s career-long articulation of the dialogic as the staging ground of ethical encounter.
Download or read book General Ecology written by Erich Hörl and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2017-05-04 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ecology has become one of the most urgent and lively fields in both the humanities and sciences. In a dramatic widening of scope beyond its original concern with the coexistence of living organisms within a natural environment, it is now recognized that there are ecologies of mind, information, sensation, perception, power, participation, media, behavior, belonging, values, the social, the political... a thousand ecologies. This proliferation is not simply a metaphorical extension of the figurative potential of natural ecology: rather, it reflects the thoroughgoing imbrication of natural and technological elements in the constitution of the contemporary environments we inhabit, the rise of a cybernetic natural state, with its corresponding mode of power. Hence this ecology of ecologies initiates and demands that we go beyond the specificity of any particular ecology: a general thinking of ecology which may also constitute an ecological transformation of thought itself is required. In this ambitious and radical new volume of writings, some of the most exciting contemporary thinkers in the field take on the task of revealing and theorizing the extent of the ecologization of existence as the effect of our contemporary sociotechnological condition: together, they bring out the complexity and urgency of the challenge of ecological thought-one we cannot avoid if we want to ask and indeed have a chance of affecting what forms of life, agency, modes of existence, human or otherwise, will participate-and how-in this planet's future.
Download or read book Futilitarianism written by Neil Vallelly and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2021-11-16 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A proposal for countering the futility of neoliberal existence to build an egalitarian, sustainable, and hopeful future. If maximizing utility leads to the greatest happiness of the greatest number of people, as utilitarianism has always proposed, then why is it that as many of us currently maximize our utility--by working endlessly, undertaking further education and training, relentlessly marketing and selling ourselves--we are met with the steady worsening of collective social and economic conditions? In Futilitarianism, social and political theorist Neil Vallelly eloquently tells the story of how neoliberalism transformed the relationship between utility maximization and the common good. Drawing on a vast array of contemporary examples, from self-help literature and marketing jargon to political speeches and governmental responses to the COVID-19 pandemic, Vallelly coins several terms--including "the futilitarian condition," "homo futilitus," and "semio-futility"--to demonstrate that in the neoliberal decades, the practice of utility maximization traps us in useless and repetitive behaviors that foreclose the possibility of collective happiness. This urgent and provocative book chimes with the mood of the time by at once mapping the historical relationship between utilitarianism and capitalism, developing an original framework for understanding neoliberalism, and recounting the lived experience of uselessness in the early twenty-first century. At a time of epoch-defining disasters, from climate emergencies to deadly pandemics, countering the futility of neoliberal existence is essential to building an egalitarian, sustainable, and hopeful future.
