Lisa Messeri, "In the Land of the Unreal: Virtual and Other Realities in Los Angeles" (Duke UP, 2024)

Lisa Messeri, "In the Land of the Unreal: Virtual and Other Realities in Los Angeles" (Duke UP, 2024)

In the mid-2010s, a passionate community of Los Angeles-based storytellers, media artists, and tech innovators formed around virtual reality (VR), believing that it could remedy society’s ills. Lisa Messeri offers an ethnographic exploration of this community, which conceptualized VR as an “empathy machine” that could provide glimpses into diverse social realities. She outlines how, in the aftermath of #MeToo, the backlash against Silicon Valley, and the turmoil of the Trump administration, it was imagined that VR—if led by women and other marginalized voices—could bring about a better world. Messeri delves into the fantasies that allowed this vision to flourish, exposing the paradox of attempting to use a singular VR experience to mend a fractured reality full of multiple, conflicting social truths. She theorizes this dynamic as unreal, noting how dreams of empathy collide with reality’s irreducibility to a “common” good. With In the Land of the Unreal: Virtual and Other Realities in Los Angeles (Duke UP, 2024), Messeri navigates the intersection of place, technology, and social change to show that technology alone cannot upend systemic forces attached to gender and race. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

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Martin Jay, "Immanent Critiques: The Frankfurt School under Pressure" (Verso, 2023)

Martin Jay, "Immanent Critiques: The Frankfurt School under Pressure" (Verso, 2023)

The Frankfurt School’s own legacy is best preserved by exercising an immanent critique of its premises and the conclusions to which they often led. By distinguishing between what is still and what is ...

30 Joulu 20251h 22min

Russell T. McCutcheon, "Critics Not Caretakers: Redescribing the Public Study of Religion" (Routledge, 2023)

Russell T. McCutcheon, "Critics Not Caretakers: Redescribing the Public Study of Religion" (Routledge, 2023)

Russell T. McCutcheon's essay collection Critics Not Caretakers: Redescribing the Public Study of Religion (Routledge, 2023) argues that the study of religion must be rethought as an ordinary aspect o...

29 Joulu 202548min

Philippe Huneman, "Why?: The Philosophy Behind the Question" (Stanford UP, 2023)

Philippe Huneman, "Why?: The Philosophy Behind the Question" (Stanford UP, 2023)

Why did triceratops have horns? Why did World War I occur? Why does Romeo love Juliet? And, most importantly, why ask why? In Why?: The Philosophy Behind the Question (Stanford UP, 2023), philosopher ...

29 Joulu 20251h 26min

Henrike Kohpeiß, "Bourgeois Coldness" (Divided Publishing, 2025)

Henrike Kohpeiß, "Bourgeois Coldness" (Divided Publishing, 2025)

Bourgeois Coldness (Divided Publishing, 2025) refers to an affective strategy that offers an explanation for how self-preservation works. Bourgeois coldness is one of the most advanced affective and...

27 Joulu 202550min

Daniel M. Herskowitz, "The Judeo-Christian Thought of Franz Rosenzweig" (Liverpool UP, 2025)

Daniel M. Herskowitz, "The Judeo-Christian Thought of Franz Rosenzweig" (Liverpool UP, 2025)

The Judeo-Christian Thought of Franz Rosenzweig (Liverpool UP, 2025) offers a new interpretation of Franz Rosenzweig's magnum opus The Star of Redemption, commonly treated as one of the high points ...

27 Joulu 20251h 10min

Marcus Willaschek, "Kant: A Revolution in Thinking" (Harvard UP, 2025)

Marcus Willaschek, "Kant: A Revolution in Thinking" (Harvard UP, 2025)

Immanuel Kant is undoubtedly the most important philosopher of the modern era. His Critique of Pure Reason, “categorical imperative,” and conception of perpetual peace in the global order decisively ...

24 Joulu 20251h 5min

Beenash Jafri, "Settler Attachments and Asian Diasporic Film" (U Minnesota Press, 2025)

Beenash Jafri, "Settler Attachments and Asian Diasporic Film" (U Minnesota Press, 2025)

Settler Attachments and Asian Diasporic Film (University of Minnesota Press, 2025) is an interdisciplinary examination of the stubborn attachment of Asian diasporas to settler-colonial ideals and of t...

23 Joulu 20251h 8min

Lucy Jeffery and Anna Váradi, "Replaying Communism: Trauma and Nostalgia in European Cultural Production" (CEU Press, 2025)

Lucy Jeffery and Anna Váradi, "Replaying Communism: Trauma and Nostalgia in European Cultural Production" (CEU Press, 2025)

In this episode, host Andrea Talabér (CEU Press) sat down with Lucy Jeffery and Anna Váradi to talk about their edited volume, Replaying Communism: Trauma and Nostalgia in European Cultural Production...

17 Joulu 202559min

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