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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Nicholas Gamso, "Art After Liberalism" (Columbia UP, 2022)

Nicholas Gamso, "Art After Liberalism" (Columbia UP, 2022)

Art After Liberalism (Columbia UP, 2022) is an account of creative practice at a moment of converging political and social rifts – a moment that could be described as a crisis of liberalism. The appar...

29 Marras 20251h 23min

Jake Monaghan, "Just Policing" (Oxford UP, 2023)

Jake Monaghan, "Just Policing" (Oxford UP, 2023)

Policing is a source of perennial conflict and philosophical disagreement. Current political developments in the United States have only increased the urgency of this topic. Today we welcome philosoph...

28 Marras 20251h 1min

Joanna Merwood-Salisbury, "Barbarian Architecture: Thorstein Veblen’s Chicago" (MIT Press, 2024)

Joanna Merwood-Salisbury, "Barbarian Architecture: Thorstein Veblen’s Chicago" (MIT Press, 2024)

An important critic of modern culture, American economist Thorstein Veblen is best known for the concept of “conspicuous consumption,” the ostentatious display of goods in the service of social status...

26 Marras 202539min

Joe Greenwood-Hau," Capital, Privilege and Political Participation" (Liverpool UP, 2025)

Joe Greenwood-Hau," Capital, Privilege and Political Participation" (Liverpool UP, 2025)

Who gets involved in politics? In Capital, Privilege and Political Participation (Liverpool UP, 2025) Joe Greenwood-Hau a Lecturer in the John Smith Centre at the University of Glasgow, examines the...

26 Marras 202545min

Piotr Nowak, "After Jews: Essays on Political Theology, Shoah and the End of Man" (Anthem Press, 2025)

Piotr Nowak, "After Jews: Essays on Political Theology, Shoah and the End of Man" (Anthem Press, 2025)

After Jews: Essays on Political Theology, Shoah and the End of Man (Anthem Press, 2025) is an attempt to describe and critically interpret the condition of man living in the shadow of the Shoah, in th...

25 Marras 20251h 6min

Elizabeth Anne Davis, "The Time of the Cannibals: On Conspiracy Theory and Context" (Fordham UP, 2024)

Elizabeth Anne Davis, "The Time of the Cannibals: On Conspiracy Theory and Context" (Fordham UP, 2024)

In 2009, the body of a former president of the Republic of Cyprus, Tassos Papadopoulos, was stolen from his grave. The Time of the Cannibals reconsiders this history and the public discourse on it to ...

25 Marras 20251h 30min

Sebastian Truskolaski, "Adorno and the Ban on Images" (Bloomsbury, 2022)

Sebastian Truskolaski, "Adorno and the Ban on Images" (Bloomsbury, 2022)

Adorno and the Ban on Images (Bloomsbury, 2022) upends some of the myths that have come to surround the work of the philosopher Theodor W. Adorno – not least amongst them, his supposed fatalism. Sebas...

24 Marras 202558min

Amy Hughes, "An Actor's Tale: Theater, Culture, and Everyday Life in the Nineteenth-Century United States" (U Michigan Press, 2025)

Amy Hughes, "An Actor's Tale: Theater, Culture, and Everyday Life in the Nineteenth-Century United States" (U Michigan Press, 2025)

Harry Watkins was no one special. During a career that spanned four decades, this nineteenth-century actor yearned for fame but merely skirted the edges of it. He performed alongside the brightest sta...

24 Marras 20251h 4min

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