New Books in Critical Theory

Where does morality fit into contemporary social science? In Moral Minefields: How Sociologists Debate Good Science (U Chicago Press, 2023), Shai Dromi, an Associate Senior Lecturer at the Department of Sociology at Harvard University and Samuel Stabler Associate Teaching Professor of Sociology at Pennsylvania State University, draw on pragmatist theory to offer insights as to how sociology can a...

Today, conspiracy theories run rampant, attacks on facts have become commonplace, and systemic inequities are on the rise as individual and collective agency unravels. The Alienation of Fact: Digital Educational Privatization, AI, and the False Promise of Bodies and Numbers (MIT Press, 2022) explains the educational, technological, and ideological preconditions for these contemporary crises of tru...

Does it ever feel like you have no free time? You come home after work and instead of finding a space of rest and relaxation, you're confronted by a pile of new tasks to complete – cooking, cleaning, looking after the kids, and so on. In After Work: A History of the Home and the Fight for Free Time (Verso, 2023), Dr. Helen Hester and Dr. Nick Srnicek lay out how unpaid work in our homes has come t...

Unionizing the Ivory Tower: Cornell Workers' Fifteen-Year Fight for Justice and a Living Wage (ILR Press, 2023) chronicles how a thousand low-paid custodians, cooks, and gardeners succeeded in organizing a union at Cornell University. Al Davidoff, the Cornell student leader who became a custodian and the union's first president, tells the extraordinary story of these ordinary workers with passion,...

Organizing Occupy Wall Street: This is Just Practice (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023) is the first study of the processes and structures of the Occupy Wall Street movement, written from the perspective of a core organizer who was involved from the inception to the end. While much has been written on OWS, few books have focused on how the movement was organized. Marisa Holmes, an organizer of OWS in New...

As the enduring "last frontier," Alaska proves an indispensable context for examining the form and function of American colonialism, particularly in the shift from western continental expansion to global empire. In this richly theorized work, Juliana Hu Pegues evaluates four key historical periods in U.S.-Alaskan history: the Alaskan purchase, the Gold Rush, the emergence of salmon canneries, and...

The Mexican Revolution was a global event that catalyzed international radicals in unexpected sites and struggles. Tracing the paths of figures like Black American artist Elizabeth Catlett, Indian anti-colonial activist M.N. Roy, Mexican revolutionary leader Ricardo Flores Magón, Okinawan migrant organizer Paul Shinsei Kōchi, and Soviet feminist Alexandra Kollontai, Arise!: Global Radicalism in th...

the near universal disappearance of shared social enterprise: the ruling class builds walls and lunar shuttles, while the rest of us contend with the atrophy of institutional integrity and the utter abdication of providing even minimal shelter from looming disaster. The irony of the Anthropocene era is that, in a neoliberal culture of the self, it is forcing us to consider ourselves as a collectiv...

Thinking of the French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, it is hard to think of him without imagining him in very particular contexts. One will likely imagine him in a Parisian cafe working through a pack of cigarettes and coffee, working on his latest play while waiting for his friend Pierre to arrive. His theories of freedom against the temptations of bad faith are thought to be theories of writers...

In Passionate Work: Endurance after the Good Life (Duke UP, 2022), Renyi Hong theorizes the notion of being "passionate about your work" as an affective project that encourages people to endure economically trying situations like unemployment, job change, repetitive and menial labor, and freelancing. Not simply a subject of aspiration, passion has been deployed as a means to build resilience and m...

Today’s guest is Ramzi Fawaz, the Romnes Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Published by NYU Press in 2016, The New Mutants: Superheroes and the Radical Imagination of American Comics is his first book. In 2022, Ramzi published Queer Forms, for which he was interviewed by Lilly Goren for the New Books in Political Science channel. He is also the co-editor of Keywords for...

"Today’s 'pro-Europeans' would be horrified at the suggestion that their idea of Europe had anything to do with whiteness. In fact, many would find the attempt to link the two baffling and outrageous," writes Hans Kundnani in Eurowhiteness: Culture, Empire and Race in the European Project (Hurst, 2023). Yet, he does so - taking the reader on a historical journey through the development of European...

Limited legal protections for privacy leave minority communities vulnerable to concrete injuries and violence when their information is exposed. In Privacy at the Margins (Cambridge UP, 2021), Scott Skinner-Thompson highlights why privacy is of acute importance for marginalized groups. He explains how privacy can serve as a form of expressive resistance to government and corporate surveillance reg...

The Unteachables: Disability Rights and the Invention of Black Special Education (U Minnesota Press, 2023) 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...

Zahi Zalloua provides the first examination of Palestinian identity from the perspective of Indigeneity and Critical Black Studies. Examining the Palestinian question through the lens of settler colonialism and Indigeneity, this timely book warns against the liberal approach to Palestinian Indigeneity, which reinforces cultural domination, and urgently argues for the universal nature of the Palest...

Michael J. Diamond's book Ruptures in the American Psyche: Containing Destructive Populism in Perilous Times (Phoenix Publishing, 2022) describes Trumpism: the strong allegiance to former President Donald Trump that is in evidence among a sizable portion of the US population. How did Trump come to be elected in 2016, and who supported him during his presidential tenure - and why? How is it that he...

Why do we always assume it was the New Right that was at the centre of constructing neoliberalism? How might corporatism have advanced neoliberalism? And, more controversially, were the trade unions only victims of neoliberal change, or did they play a more contradictory role? In How Labour Built Neoliberalism: Australia’s Accord, the Labour Movement and the Neoliberal Project (Haymarket 2019), El...

Why are our lives filled with so much stuff? In Crap: A History of Cheap Stuff in America (U Chicago Press, 2023), Wendy Woloson, Professor and Chair in the Department of History at Rutgers University, tells the history of these objects and things, from the early years of peddlers through to modern gadgets, and everything in between. In telling this story the book tells a history of America itself...

Big Tech locked us into their systems by making their platforms hard to leave by design. The impossibility of staying connected to people on their platforms after you delete your account has nothing to do with technological limitations: it's an intentional business strategy. In The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation (Verso, 2023), Cory Doctorow explains how to seize the means of c...

Immanuel Wallerstein's world-systems theory can help to better understand and describe developments of the 21st century. The contributors of Wallerstein 2.0: Thinking and Applying World-Systems Theory in the 21st Century (Transcript Publishing, 2023) address ways to reread Wallerstein's theoretical thoughts in the humanities and social sciences. The presented interdisciplinary approach of this ant...

Why does the financial sector matter? In How to Build a Stock Exchange: The Past, Present and Future of Finance (Bristol UP, 2023), Philip Roscoe, a Professor of Management at the University of St Andrews, explores the history of the London Stock Exchange as part of a broader examination of the role of finance in the modern world. Richly detailed, including personal reflections as well as intervie...

In Unruly Women: Race, Neocolonialism, and the Hijab (Oxford UP, 2022), Falguni Sheth explores the multiple ways that liberalism is understood and exploited, and liberalism’s origin as a project of British colonialism and as a legacy of settler colonialism in the U.S. The “unruly women” in the author’s title are, in liberalism, women who do not conform or who are not “suitably feminist”—like Musli...

Alongside their collective acumen in traditional historical-critical and social-scientific approaches to the New Testament, James Crossley and Robert J. Myles bring a worthwhile dose of historical materialist criticism to historical Jesus scholarship in Jesus: A Life in Class Conflict (Zero Books/John Hunt Publishing, 2023). And while the Jesus they reconstruct from the various sources available f...

In the United States, the stoicism and importance of the “working class” is part of the national myth. The term is often used to conjure the contributions and challenges of the white working class – and this obscures the ways in which Black workers built institutions like the railroads and universities – but also how they transformed unions, changed public policy, and established community.  In Bl...

How did the rise of consumerism impact Britain? In Lifestyle Revolution: How Taste Changed Class in Late 20th-Century Britain (Manchester UP, 2023), Ben Highmore, a Professor of Cultural Studies in the School of Media, Arts and Humanities at the University of Sussex, explores this question by telling the story of key British institutions and cultural habits. The book uses a wealth of different sou...