We have long since lost our faith in the idea that human beings could achieve human happiness in some future ideal state-a state that Thomas More, writing five centuries ago, tied to a topos, a fixed place, a land, an island, a sovereign state under a wise and benevolent ruler. But while we have lost our faith in utopias of all hues, the human aspiration that made this vision so compelling has not died. Instead it is re-emerging today as a vision focused not on the future but on the past, not on a future-to-be-created but on an abandoned and undead past that we could call retrotopia.
The emergence of retrotopia is interwoven with the deepening gulf between power and politics that is a defining feature of our contemporary liquid-modern world-the gulf between the ability to get things done and the capability of deciding what things need to be done, a capability once vested with the territorially sovereign state. This deepening gulf has rendered nation-states unable to deliver on their promises, giving rise to a widespread disenchantment with the idea that the future will improve the human condition and a mistrust in the ability of nation-states to make this happen. True to the utopian spirit, retrotopia derives its stimulus from the urge to rectify the failings of the present human condition-though now by resurrecting the failed and forgotten potentials of the past. Imagined aspects of the past, genuine or putative, serve as the main landmarks today in drawing the road-map to a better world. Having lost all faith in the idea of building an alternative society of the future, many turn instead to the grand ideas of the past, buried but not yet dead. Such is retrotopia, the contours of which are examined by Zygmunt Bauman in this sharp dissection of our contemporary romance with the past.
We are all fascinated by the mystery of metamorphosis - of the caterpillar that transforms itself into a butterfly. Their bodies have almost nothing in common. They don't share the same world: one crawls on the ground and the other flutters its wings in the air. And yet they are one and the same life. Emanuele Coccia argues that metamorphosis - the phenomenon that allows the same life to subsist in disparate bodies - is the relationship that binds all species together and unites the living with the non-living. Bacteria, viruses, fungi, plants, animals: they are all one and the same life. Each species, including the human species, is the metamorphosis of all those that preceded it - the same life, cobbling together a new body and a new form in order to exist differently. And there is no opposition between the living and the non-living: life is always the reincarnation of the non-living, a carnival of the telluric substance of a planet - the Earth - that continually draws new faces and new ways of being out of even the smallest particle of its disparate body. By highlighting what joins humans together with other forms of life, Coccia's brilliant reflection on metamorphosis encourages us to abandon our view of the human species as static and independent and to recognize instead that we are part of a much larger and interconnected form of life.
The pelvic exam. If you've ever had one, you're probably already wincing. It might be considered a routine medical procedure, but for most of us, it is anything from unpleasant to traumatic.
In Exposed, noted historian Wendy Kline uncovers the procedure's fascinating-and often disturbing-history. From gynecological research on enslaved women's bodies to nonconsensual practice on anesthetized patients, the pelvic exam as we know it today carries the burden of its sordid past. Its story is one of pain and pleasure, life-saving discoveries and heartbreaking encounters, questionable procedures and triumphant breakthroughs. Drawing on previously unpublished archival sources, along with interviews with patients, providers, and activists, Kline traces key moments and movements in gynecological history, from the surgeons of the nineteenth century to the OB/GYNs of today.
This powerful book reminds us that the pelvic exam is has never been "just" a medical procedure, and that we can no longer afford to let the pelvic exam remain unexamined.
Susanna Rustin's Sexed is a radical retelling of the story of British feminism. Starting in the revolutionary 1790s and ending in the present day, she introduces the 1830s radicals who demanded "LIBERTY FOR EVER!", Victorian petitioners who expected to be dead before women won the vote, and rival camps of suffragists who embraced and rejected violence. She considers the contributions of the first female MPs, as well as activists including the Greenham peace protesters and the black and Asian women's groups of the 1970s and 1980s.
Her goal? To show how successive generations have fiercely contested what it means to be a woman, and why this matters. Biology on its own is not destiny. But this book argues that differences between male and female bodies have always been feminist issues. While gender is a useful concept, women cannot be supported by a politics that forgets that they, like men, are sexed.
A war is being waged against the Past. Whether it's toppling statues, decolonising the curriculum or erasing terms from our vocabulary, a cultural crusade is underway designed to render the past toxic. It is condemned as enemy territory and has become the target of venomous hate. What is at stake in provoking such a strong sense of societal shame towards Western history?
In this book, Frank Furedi mounts a fierce defence of the past and calls for a fight back against the delegitimization of its ideals and accomplishments. Casting the past as a story of shame has become a taken-for granted outlook permeating the educational and cultural life of western society from the top down. Its advocates may see it as a cultural imperative, but a society that loses touch with its past will face a permanent crisis of identity. Squandering the wisdom provided by our historical inheritance means betraying humanity's positive achievements. Challenging this great betrayal, Furedi argues, is one of the most important battles of our time.
Disasters kill, maim, and generate increasingly large economic losses. But they do not wreak their damage equally across nations and populations. Every disaster has social forces at its very core. This important book sheds light on the social conditions and the global, national, and local processes that produce environmental degradation and disaster. Topics covered include the social roots of disaster vulnerability, exposure to natural hazards as a form of environmental injustice, and emerging threats. Written by a leading expert in the field, the book provides the necessary frameworks for understanding hazards and disasters, as it explores the contributions of various social science disciplines to disaster research and how these ideas have evolved over time. Bringing the social aspects of disasters to the forefront, Tierney discusses the challenge of conducting research in the aftermath of a disaster and critiques the concept of disaster resilience, which has come to be seen as a key to disaster risk reduction. This second edition places greater emphasis on climate-related disasters and offers new reflections on the impacts of Covid-19, additional material on the legacies of colonialism, and refreshed case studies. Peppered with research findings and insights from a wide range of disciplines, this rich introduction is an invaluable resource for students and scholars interested in both the social nature of disasters and their relation to broader social forces.
Do you worry that your understanding of English grammar isn't what it should be? It may not be your fault. For hundreds of years, vague and confused ideas about how to state the rules have been passed down from one generation to the next. The available books for the general reader - thousands of them, shamelessly plagiarizing each other - repeat the same misguided definitions and generalizations that appeared in the schoolbooks used by your great-great-grandparents.
Geoffrey K. Pullum thinks you deserve better. In this book he breaks away from the tradition. Presupposing no prior knowledge or technical terms, he provides an informal introduction to the essential concepts underlying grammar and usage. With his foundation, you will be equipped to understand the classification of words, the structure of phrases and clauses, and why some supposed grammar rules are really just myths. Also covered are some of the key points about spelling, apostrophes, hyphens, capitalization, and punctuation.
Illuminating, witty, and incisive, The Truth About English Grammar is a vital book for all who love writing, reading, and thinking about English.
War is urbanising. From Mosul to Mumbai, Aleppo to Marawi, the largest and most intense battles of the twenty-first century have taken place in densely populated urban areas. In the Ukraine War, Russian and Ukrainian troops have converged on urban areas, Kyiv, Mariupol, and Bakhmut, to fight brutal attritional sieges. Meanwhile the Battle of Gaza rages.
Through a close analysis of recent urban conflicts and their historical antecedents, sociologist Anthony King explores the changing typography of the urban battlescape. Whilst many tactics used in urban warfare are not new, he shows how operations in cities today have coalesced into localised micro-sieges, which extend from street level - and below - to the airspace high above the city, as combatants fight for individual buildings, streets and districts. At the same time, digitalized social media and information networks communicate these battles to global audiences across an urban archipelago, with these spectators often becoming active participants in the fight.
Fully revised and updated to include detailed examples from Ukraine and Gaza to illustrate the anatomy of twenty-first century urban warfare, the second edition of this popular text is a timely reminder of the costs and the horror of war and violence in cities. As such, it offers an invaluable interdisciplinary introduction to urban warfare in the new millennium for students of international security, urban studies and military science, as well as military professionals.
Man's best friend, domesticated since prehistoric times, a travelling companion for explorers and artists, thinkers and walkers, equally happy curled up by the fire and bounding through the great outdoors-dogs matter to us because we love them. But is that all there is to the canine's good-natured voracity and affectionate dependency?
Mark Alizart dispenses with the well-worn clichés concerning dogs and their masters, seeing them not as submissive pets but rather as unexpected life coaches, ready to teach us the elusive recipes for contentment and joy. Dogs have faced their fate in life with a certain detachment that is not easy to understand. Unlike other animals in a similar situation, they have not become hardened, nor have they let themselves die a little inside. On the contrary, they seem to have softened. This book is devoted to understanding this miracle, the miracle of the joy of dogs - to understanding it and, if at all possible, to learning how it's done.
Weaving elegantly and eruditely between historical myth and pop-culture anecdote, between the peculiar views of philosophers and the even more bizarre findings of science, Alizart offers us a surprising new portrait of the dog as thinker-a thinker who may perhaps know the true secret of our humanity.
Feminism has been defeated.
Once a politics, feminism is now a philosophy, an epistemology, a method. Once for women, it is now for everyone. Once in pursuit of liberation, it now seeks only inclusion.
In Feminism, Defeated, Kate Phelan traces the depoliticization and ultimately, the defeat of feminism. She recovers the second-wave view of men and women as sex-classes, enemies, political kinds, a view more radical than the contemporary view of men and women as social constructs. She also describes how poststructuralism displaced this view and replaced it with another. In this view, the sex/gender binary constructs men and women, and excludes the gender nonconforming.
As this view replaced the second-wave one, the injustice of men's oppression of women was replaced by that of exclusion, and the goal of women's liberation was replaced by that of inclusion. Thus did feminism become the trans-inclusionary movement as which we now know it, and Phelan shows that this shift was not the progression of feminism; it was the betrayal of it. In this highly original and persuasive study, she argues that the recent emergence of a new gender-critical feminism presents a moment of opportunity to reclaim feminism's political project.
Recent decades of neoliberal rule have seen authoritarian turns in many governments, and these decades have also been marked by increasing violence against women. The systematic killing of women in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, has given way to a violent surge that is worldwide in its scope, concentrated in places where the state's traditional, sovereign functions have broken down. Femicide is no longer just an intimate event: it has become anonymous and systematic, a crime of power. An intensified form of capitalism, the product of a colonial modernity that is still with us, now fuels new wars on women, which destroy society while targeting women's bodies.
Understanding this new, violent turn within patriarchy-which Rita Segato considers the primal form of human domination-means moving patriarchy from the margins to the center of our social analysis. According to Segato, it is only by revitalizing community and repoliticizing domestic space that we can redirect history towards a different destiny. At stake is nothing less than the future of humanity.
The world cannot address its pressing environmental problems without China. But can China be relied upon as a steadfast steward of nature, as its leaders have claimed in recent years?
Prominent environmental campaigner and reporter Ma Tianjie gets to the heart of China's remarkable ecological transformation to answer this question. He takes us on a journey through the country's thirty-year struggle to clean up its rivers, clear its air and stabilize carbon emissions, drawing out the complex political impulses that have helped and hindered progress. Anchoring his storytelling in some of China's major environmental challenges - from Beijing's `airpocalypse' to the cancer villages of the Huai River basin, he shows how the ideas and actions of few extraordinary individuals were critical in changing China from a heavily polluted country to a place where environmental issues are high on the agenda. The complex ecological tapestry Ma paints illuminates the key ideas, experiences and influences that have shaped China's environmental consciousness and will continue to frame the search for green China well into the twenty-first century.
Contemporary societies demand clear-minded, evidence-based ideas to address complex social issues. Communication scholarship has a rich trove of knowledge and experiences to help address such problems.
In this passionately argued manifesto, Silvio Waisbord examines public scholarship in communication studies and its potential for contributing to the common good. He discusses the various ways scholars seek to serve the public as practitioners, experts, advocates, activists and critics, and underscores their significant contribution which has not, to date, been properly supported or recognized. Only by tackling academic institutional politics, he argues, will it be possible to strengthen public scholarship as central to the mission of communication studies.
The Communication Manifesto is a roadmap to action and will inspire communication scholars and students to be public citizens, thereby connecting their work and expertise to the causes of solidarity, humanity and social justice.
This book challenges the pessimism that has so marked, and impoverished, social theorizing about modern life. Modernity has often been dark and debilitating, but it has also generated hope for a better life and extraordinary reforms and liberations, from the creation of hopeful democracies in the face of dangerous dictatorships to feminist transformations of patriarchy, struggles against imperialism and racial domination, and the stubborn but persistent reconstruction of pivotal institutions. Jeffrey Alexander theorizes these radical reforms as "civil repairs" - as efforts to make real the utopian promises of the civil sphere. Ideal civil spheres make stirring commitments to social solidarity, equality, and individual autonomy. Real civil spheres are rent by anti-civil hierarchies of class, gender, race, and religion. Contradictions between real and ideal civil spheres generate social movements for justice, which are not only about challenging power but making new and more solidarizing meanings. Civil repair is at once symbolic and institutional. It offers a new way to conceptualize progressive social change.
Faced with growing inequalities and new forms of domination and exploitation, can the movement of emancipation take on a new life today, or has it been arrested by the powers of repression and normalization?
In order to address this question, Jacques Rancière pays close attention to the sociopolitical rhythms of our time, listening for the figures of trembling and oscillation that are often drowned out by the deafening hubbub of the media. He questions the relationship between democracies and the very concept of democracy, and questions what, in the social movements and protests taking place today, offers a possibility of emancipation. Emancipation means breaking out of the established hierarchies, proposing a ludic attitude of free-floating distance and bringing into it a space of equality to replace the dominant order of inequalities.
In five conversations on politics, art, literature, philosophy and cinema, Jacques Rancière and Aliocha Wald Lasowski consider the form, experience and collectives which characterise emancipation. In so doing, they imagine the world of tomorrow and the radical utopias that will bring it closer to us.
For decades we have known about the dangers of global warming. Nevertheless, greenhouse gas emissions continue to increase. How can we explain our failure to take the necessary measures to stop climate change? Why are societies, despite the mounting threat to ourselves and our children, so reluctant to take action?
In this important new book, Jens Beckert provides an answer to these questions. Our apparent inability to implement basic measures to combat climate change is due to the nature of power and incentive structures affecting companies, politicians, voters, and consumers. Drawing on social science research, he argues that climate change is an inevitable product of the structures of capitalist modernity which have been developing for the past 500 years. Our institutional and cultural arrangements are operating at the cost of destroying the natural environment and attempts to address global warming are almost inevitably bound to fail. Temperatures will continue to rise and social and political conflicts will intensify. The tragic truth is: we are selling our future for the next quarterly figures, the upcoming election results, and today's pleasure. Any realistic climate policy needs to focus on preparing societies for the consequences of escalating climate change and aim at strengthening social resilience to cope with the increasingly unstable natural world. Civil society is the only source of pressure that could build the necessary strength and support for climate protection.
How We Sold Our Future is a crucial intervention into the most pressing issue of our time.
Humans are the most intelligent beings this planet has ever produced. But how is it that we can travel into space, cure diseases and decode the fundamentals of life, and at the same time find ourselves faced with an existential crisis that threatens to overwhelm us? What lies behind this uncharacteristic failure to master the most important challenge of our existence? In this compelling book, the leading archaeogeneticist Johannes Krause and the journalist Thomas Trappe investigate what DNA can tell us about how we got where we are and what our future might be. They show how the first humans were defeated again and again and suffered fatal setbacks, and how Homo sapiens succeeded in conquering continents, overcoming natural borders, and bringing other species under its control. But the genetic blueprint that enabled us to get to the place where we are today had one flaw: it didn't factor in planetary boundaries. Now that we are approaching those boundaries for the first time after millions of years of evolution, an urgent question arises: can we learn to live within the available planetary limits, or are we doomed by our DNA to continue to expand, consume, and absorb the resources around us to the point of exhaustion, consigning ourselves and other species to extinction? Has our seemingly unstoppable rise met its ultimate end? While the looming climate crisis does not augur well for humanity's capacity to adapt to the new situation in which it finds itself, we are not at the mercy of our DNA - or at least we don't have to be. But can we harness the lessons of the past to survive the present?
Now available as an audiobook.
Since 2012, hundreds of men and women have left Western countries to join jihadist groups fighting in Syria. Many are still there, many have been killed, but some have chosen to return to their countries of origin. French Journalist David Thomson met some of those who came back. Bilel, Yassin, Zoubeir, Lena, each has a different profile and story. Some have returned disgusted by the violence of the Syrian battlefields, or the terrorist attacks that have struck across Europe; they try to become forgotten, living under extreme surveillance. Others return seriously wounded or psychologically destroyed. Others still are in jail, a breeding ground for broader radicalization. And some have come back to continue to carry out jihad in Europe. In utmost secrecy, David Thomson gathered their testimonies and recounts them in this remarkable and revealing book.
With ISIS losing ground on all fronts, the steady flow of jihadists returning to Europe represents one of the greatest challenges facing countries across the continent. This nuanced analysis of the social, religious, political, familial and psychological factors that push people to violent extremism is more necessary now than ever. It will be essential reading for all those seeking to understand how we might address this threat.
What we call growth today is in fact a tumorous growth, a cancerous proliferation which is disrupting the social organism. These tumours endlessly metastasize and grow with an inexplicable, deadly vitality. At a certain point this growth is no longer productive, but rather destructive. Capitalism passed this point long ago. Its destructive forces cause not only ecological and social catastrophes but also mental collapse. The destructive compulsion to perform combines self-affirmation and self-destruction in one. We optimize ourselves to death. Brutal competition ends in destruction. It produces an emotional coldness and indifference towards others as well as towards one's own self. The devastating consequences of capitalism suggest that a death drive is at work. Freud initially introduced the death drive hesitantly, but later admitted that he `couldn't think beyond it' as the idea of the death drive became increasingly central to his thought. Today, it is impossible to think about capitalism without considering the death drive.
What are we made up of? What holds material bodies together? Is there a difference between terrestrial matter and celestial matter - the matter that makes up the Earth and the matter that makes up the Sun and other stars? When Democritus stated, between the fifth and fourth centuries BCE, that we are made up of atoms, few people believed him. Not until Galileo and Newton in the seventeenth century did people take the idea seriously, and it was another four hundred years before we could reconstruct the elementary components of matter. Everything around us - the matter that forms rocks and planets, flowers and stars, even us - has very particular properties. These properties, which seem quite normal to us, are in fact very special, because the universe, whose evolution began almost fourteen billion years ago, is today a very cold environment. In this book, Guido Tonelli explains how elementary particles, which make up matter, combine into bizarre shapes to form correlated quantum states, primordial soups of quarks and gluons, or massive neutron stars. New questions that have emerged from the most recent research are answered: in what sense is the vacuum a material state? Why can space-time also vibrate and oscillate? Can elementary grains of space and time exist? What forms does matter assume inside large black holes? In clear and lively prose, Tonelli takes readers on an exhilarating journey into the latest discoveries of contemporary science, enabling them to see the universe, and themselves, in a new light.
Also available as an audiobook
Ditching the stuffy hang-ups and benighted sexual traditionalism of the past is an unambiguously positive thing. The sexual revolution has liberated us to enjoy a heady mixture of erotic freedom and personal autonomy. Right? Wrong, argues Louise Perry in her provocative new book. Although it would be neither possible nor desirable to turn the clock back to a world of pre-60s sexual mores, she argues that the amoral libertinism and callous disenchantment of liberal feminism and our contemporary hypersexualised culture represent more loss than gain. The main winners from a world of rough sex, hook-up culture and ubiquitous porn - where anything goes and only consent matters - are a tiny minority of high-status men, not the women forced to accommodate the excesses of male lust. While dispensing sage advice to the generations paying the price for these excesses, she makes a passionate case for a new sexual culture built around dignity, virtue and restraint. This counter-cultural polemic from one of the most exciting young voices in contemporary feminism should be read by all men and women uneasy about the mindless orthodoxies of our ultra-liberal era.
Also available as an audiobook narrated by the author.
What does a coffee machine, a car, road signs, a smartphone, a cathedral, a work of art, a satellite, a bicycle, a washing machine, a bridge, a watch, a computer, the body of a prominent politician and a tractor have in common? Pretty much nothing - except for the fact that, no matter how small, large, important or insignificant something is, it rarely survives without being cared for. Every object eventually experiences wear and tear, it deteriorates, stops working or breaks down. But are we giving the care of things the recognition it deserves? A counterpoint to our modern obsession with innovation but less striking than the one-off act of restoration, the delicate act of making things last rarely attracts our attention.
This book disrupts our dominant narratives by putting those individuals skilled in the art of maintenance front and centre. Jérôme Denis and David Pontille shine a spotlight on the subtle aspects of caring for things, tracing the stories of those involved and, with them, the ethical challenges raised and political lessons learned. These people demonstrate a sensitivity and attentiveness to fragility; they encourage us to cultivate a material diplomacy in which wear is accepted and our relation to things becomes a matter of negotiation and compromise - a far cry from the frenetic rhythm of planned obsolescence inherent in hyper-consumerism. Maintenance demarcates the contours of a world in which we have relinquished the human longing for unlimited power and technological autonomy, a world where our attachment to things is more profound than we ever imagined.
T. M. Scanlon is one of the world's leading philosophers, widely known for his contractualist moral theory and his distinctive account of moral responsibility and blame. In these important essays, written between 2001 and 2021, Scanlon reflects on the lines of thinking that led him to these views, considers objections to them, and locates them in relation to the views of others, including Derek Parfit, Harry Frankfurt, Gary Watson, and Christine Korsgaard.
The result will be essential reading for scholars and students in moral philosophy, political philosophy, and the philosophy of law.
Carol Gilligan's landmark book In a Different Voice - the "little book that started a revolution" - brought women's voices to the fore in work on the self and moral development, enabling women to be heard in their own right, and with their own integrity, for the first time. Forty years later, Gilligan returns to the subject matter of her classic book, re-examining its central arguments and concerns from the vantage point of the present. Thanks to the work that she and others have done in recent decades, it is now possible to clarify and articulate what couldn't quite be seen or said at the time of the original publication: that the "different voice" (of care ethics), although initially heard as a "feminine" voice, is in fact a human voice; that the voice it differs from is a patriarchal voice (bound to gender binaries and hierarchies); and that where patriarchy is in force or enforced, the human voice is a voice of resistance, and care ethics is an ethics of liberation. While gender is central to the story Gilligan tells, this is not a story about gender: it is a human story. With this clarification, it becomes evident why In a Different Voice continues to resonate strongly with people's experience and, perhaps more crucially, why the different voice is a voice for the 21st century.
