New Books in Critical Theory

A turkey is the centerpiece of countless Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners. Yet most of us know almost nothing about today’s specially bred, commercially produced birds. In this brief book, bestselling author Peter Singer tells their story—and, unfortunately, it’s not a happy one. Along the way, he also offers a brief history of the turkey and its consumption, ridicules the annual U.S. presidenti...

In a world filled with both enormous wealth and pockets of great devastation, how should the well-off respond to the world's needy? This is the urgent central question of Being Good in a World of Need (Oxford UP, 2024). Larry S. Temkin, one of the world's foremost ethicists, challenges common assumptions about philanthropy, his own prior beliefs, and the dominant philosophical positions of Peter S...

In How We Write Now: Living with Black Feminist Theory (Duke UP, 2024), Jennifer C. Nash examines how Black feminists use beautiful writing to allow writers and readers to stay close to the field’s central object and preoccupation: loss. She demonstrates how contemporary Black feminist writers and theorists such as Jesmyn Ward, Elizabeth Alexander, Christina Sharpe, and Natasha Trethewey mobilize...

How can Black Atlantic literature challenge conventions and redefine literary scholarship? Abolition Time: Grammars of Law, Poetics of Justice (U Minnesota Press, 2024) is an invitation to reenvision abolitionist justice through literary studies. Placing critical race theory, queer theory, critical prison studies, and antiprison activism in conversation with an archive of Black Atlantic literature...

In this episode of the Language on the Move podcast, Brynn Quick speaks with Dr. Laura Smith-Khan about language and accents in children’s media, from Octonauts to Disney to Bluey, and they investigate what a choice as seemingly banal as a character’s accent has to do with whiteness, standard language ideology, and securing a nation’s borders. They then reflect on Laura’s most recently published p...

Is human solidarity achievable in a world dominated by continuous digital connectivity and commercially managed platforms? And what if it’s not? Professor Nick Couldry explores these urgent questions in his latest book, The Space of the World: Can Human Solidarity Survive Social Media and What If It Can’t? (Polity, 2024), as discussed in a recent interview with the New Books Network. In a conversa...

In Fractal Repair: Queer Histories of Modern Jamaica (Duke UP, 2024), Matthew Chin investigates queerness in Jamaica from early colonial occupation to the present, critically responding to the island’s global reputation for extreme homophobia and anti-queer violence. Chin advances a theory and method of queer fractals to bring together genealogies of queer and Caribbean formation. Fractals—a kind...

The recent retreat from globalization has been triggered by a perception that increased competition from global trade is not fair and leads to increased inequality within countries. Is this phenomenon a small hiccup in the overall wave of globalization, or are we at the beginning of a new era of deglobalization? Former Chief Economist of the World Bank Group Pinelopi Koujianou Goldberg tells us th...

In Smart University: Student Surveillance in the Digital Age (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2024), Lindsay Weinberg evaluates how this latest era of tech solutions and systems in our schools impacts students' abilities to access opportunities and exercise autonomy on their campuses. Using historical and textual analysis of administrative discourses, university policies, conference proceedings, g...

In the present day, Big Tech is extracting resources from us, transferring and centralizing resources from people to companies. These companies are grabbing our most basic natural resources--our data--exploiting our labor and connections, and repackaging our information to control our views, track our movements, record our conversations, and discriminate against us. These companies tell us this is...

How did Jurgen Klopp change Liverpool? In Transformer: Klopp, the Revolution of a Club and Culture (Canongate, 2024), Neil Atkinson, host of The Anfield Wrap tells the story of Klopp’s time at the football club and in the city. The book ranges widely, from socio-cultural history, through personal memoir, to tactical analysis and contemplations on the changing styles and patterns of football. Struc...

In this episode, Dr. Hizer Mir speaks with Momodou Taal on Critical Race Theory and Black Lives Matter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

How Is It Between Us?: Relational Ethics and Care for the World (HAU Books, 2023) offers a new theory of relational ethics that tackles contemporary issues. In How Is It Between Us?, Jarrett Zigon puts anthropology and phenomenological hermeneutics in conversation to develop a new theory of relational ethics. This relational ethics takes place in the between, the interaction not just between peopl...

Challenging mainstream narratives in political economy, the new book Feminist Political Economy: A Global Perspective (Agenda Publishing, 2023) serves as an introduction to a new era of critical research. It is written by Prof. Sara Cantillon, Dr. Sara Stevano and Prof. Odile Mackett, who have carried out incredible work to deconstruct gender-blind approaches in contemporary economic research. The...

By the 1970s, World War II had all but disappeared from US popular culture. But beginning in the mid-eighties it reemerged with a vengeance, and for nearly fifteen years World War II was ubiquitous across US popular and political culture. In Reinventing World War II: Popular Memory in the Rise of the Ethnonationalist State (Penn State University Press, 2024), Dr. Barbara A. Biesecker explores the...

From rock & roll to contemporary pop, Mixing Pop and Politics: A Marxist History of Popular Music (Repeater, 2024) is a timely and original exploration of popular music’s role in shaping our society. Told through a Marxist lens, Toby Manning traces the last seventy years of political and social upheavals through its most iconic US and UK-based music. Mixing Pop and Politics examines the connection...

In this episode, Dr. Ismail Patel talks with Prof. Hatem Bazian about structural Islamophobia, global politics and the demonisation of the Muslim. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

Digitizing Domesticity in the 1980s: The Intimate Life of Computers (U Minnesota Press, 2024) shows how the widespread introduction of home computers in the 1980s was purposefully geared toward helping sustain heteronormative middle-class families by shaping relationships between users. Moving beyond the story of male-dominated computer culture, this book emphasizes the neglected history of the in...

Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel, talks to Benjamin Shestakofsky about his book, Behind the Startup: How Venture Capital Shapes Work, Innovation, and Inequality (U California Press, 2024). Shestakofsky is Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania, where he is affiliated with AI at Wharton and the Center on Digital Culture and Society. His research centers on how digital t...

Today I’m speaking with Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins about the new, edited volume, Did It Happen Here? Perspectives on Fascism and America (W.W. Norton, 2024). Danny is Assistant Professor in the College of Social Studies at Wesleyan University and the steward of a fantastic interview series in The Nation magazine. Did it Happen Here? presents a snapshot of the fascism debate being waged on American c...

Imagining After Capitalism (Triarchy Press, 2025) is the culmination of a decade-long exploration of what comes next after capitalism. It leverages previous work in developing foresight methodologies, which are featured in two previous books: Teaching about the Future and Thinking about the Future (2nd edition), both with Peter Bishop. It also leverages my work in identifying long-term values shif...

What really separates emancipatory thinking from its opposite? The prevailing Left defines itself against neoliberalism, conservative traditionalism, and fascism as a matter of course. The philosophical differences, however, may be more apparent than real.  The Right-Wing Mirror of Critical Theory: Studies of Schmitt, Oakeshott, Hayek, Strauss, and Rand (Rowman & Littlefield, 2023) argues that dom...

Streaming Music, Streaming Capital (Duke University Press, 2024)  provides a much-needed study of the political economy of music streaming, drawing from Western Marxism, social reproduction theory, eco-socialist thought and more to approach the complex and highly contested relationship between music and capital. By attending to the perverse ways in which recorded music has been ultimately decommod...

To meet the greenhouse gas emissions reductions needed to stave off the worst impacts of climate change, a transition away from fossil fuels must occur, as quickly as possible. But there are many unknowns when it comes to moving from theory to implementation for such a large-scale energy transition, to say nothing of whether this transition will be “just.”  In A Just Transition for All: Workers an...

How does the music industry actually work? In Corporate Life in the Digital Music Industry: Remaking the Major Record Label from the Inside Out Toby Bennett, a Senior Lecturer in Media, Culture & Organisation in the School of Media and Communications at the University of Westminster offers a deep ethnography of everyday life in a contemporary record company. The book examines the challenges facing...