Karl Spracklen, “Whiteness and Leisure” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013)
Our taken for granted assumptions are questioned in a new book by Karl Spracklen, a professor of leisure studies at Leeds Metropolitan University in England. Whiteness and Leisure (Palgrave, 2013) combines two bodies of theoretical literature to interrogate leisure activities which seem innocuous or inoffensive. The book deploys insights from critical race theory along with the work of Jurgen Habermas to at once critique leisure as a site for the continued reproduction of inequality, but at the same time consider the utopian or transformative possibilities offered by leisure activity. The central inequality concerning Whiteness and Leisure is that of the socially constructed, but socially powerful, idea of race. Spracklen argues that whilst there is no scientific evidence for the vast swathes of claims made about race, the idea is influential in modern life. Most notably, ideas of race create categories of normal or taken for granted, in the case of whiteness, and other, exotic and different in the case of blackness. The replication of social inequality using categories of race is shown in discussions of sport, both participating and watching, of popular culture, such as Harry Potter and World of Warcraft, Music, including Folk and Metal, and forms of travel, tourism and outdoor experience. Drawing on a wide range of literature, empirical examples and personal anecdotes, the text will be of interest to readers from across both social science and the humanities, as well as anyone concerned with social justice. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory
12 Syys 201446min
John Protevi, “Life, War, Earth: Deleuze and the Sciences” (University of Minnesota Press, 2013)
Right now, humanists across very different disciplinary fields are trying to create the kinds of cross-disciplinary conversations that might open up new ways to conceptualize and ask questions of our objects of study. John Protevi‘s new book offers a wonderfully stimulating conceptual toolbox for doing just that. Life, War, Earth: Deleuze and the Sciences (University of Minnesota Press, 2013) creates (and guides readers through) a dialogue between the work of Gilles Deleuze and some key works and concepts animating contemporary geophilosophy, cognitive science, and biology. In doing so, Protevi’s work also has the potential to inform work in STS by turning our attention to new possibilities of thinking with scale, and with a process-oriented philosophy (among many other things). A first introduction lays out some of the basic conceptual tools and orientations emerging from Deleuze’s work, and a second introduction uses some of these ideas to explore the work of Francisco Varela in terms of a political physiology of “bodies politic.” After this pair of introductions, the following chapters focus on particular case studies, ranging from ancient and modern warfare, to hydropolitics, to the notion of a “socially mediated neuroplasticity” in cognitive science, to the role of affect in understanding the Occupy Wall Street movement, to the “eco-devo-evo” of Mary Jane West-Eberhard, and much, much else. It’s a fascinating study that has much to offer for the reader who is interested in the creative and analytic possibilities of bringing continental philosophy to bear in science studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory
22 Elo 20141h 8min
Helene Snee, “A Cosmopolitan Journey: Difference, Distinction and Identity Work in Gap Year Travel” (Ashgate, 2014)
Helene Snee, a researcher at the University of Manchester, has written an excellent new book that should be essential reading for anyone interested in the modern world. The book uses the example of the ‘gap year’, an important moment in young people’s lives, to deconstruct issues of class, cosmopolitanism and identity. Like many other aspects of contemporary life, common assumptions about travel (as opposed to tourism) or the individual experience (as opposed to patterns in social life) are taken apart in the book. The book reflects broader debates around class in British society that have been influenced by French theorist Pierre Bourdieu, such as the recent Great British Class Survey. The book situates itself in the tradition that seeks to unsettle the assumptions about taken for granted ideas about what is good judgement or good taste, asking why one form of, largely, middle class self development is privileged over others. A Cosmopolitan Journey? Difference, Distinction and Identity Work in Gap Year Travel (Ashgate, 2014) is not just a contribution to critical theory. In order to understand the lives of the gap year individuals, Snee uses online blogs as evidence for the way that the ‘gappers’ tell stories that are about the places they have come from (rather than travelled to), about having ‘authentic’ (& potentially middle class) experiences during their travels and about being self-developing individuals. Crucially the book shows how even the word ‘travelling’ draws boundaries with ‘tourism’ to show how power and class dominance function to make it seem as if ‘not everyone has the good taste to take a gap year’, rather than the choice of a gap year being part of a much broader social structure. Snee’s combination of travel and tourism as a topic, using predominantly young people’s experiences as an example, along with the way the text speaks directly to sociological debates between thinkers such as Bourdieu and Giddens, mark A Cosmopolitan Journey out as essential reading for a very wide audience. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory
12 Elo 201441min
William E. Connolly, “The Fragility of Things: Self-Organizing Processes, Neoliberal Fantasies, and Democratic Activism” (Duke UP, 2013)
Bill Connolly‘s new book proposes a way to think about the world as a gathering of self-organizing systems or ecologies, and from there explores the ramifications and possibilities of this notion for how we think about and practice work with markets, politics, daily life, and beyond. The Fragility of Things: Self-Organizing Processes, Neoliberal Fantasies, and Democratic Activism (Duke UP, 2013) opens with a prelude that takes readers into the 1755 earthquake disaster in Lisbon via Voltaire’s Candide, using this to introduce a critique of neoliberalism that will continue to be so important for the duration of the book. Connolly reframes our understanding of markets in terms of an entanglement of human and nonhuman systems, with main chapters successively offering a critique of current thinking about neoliberalism and clear suggestions for how to move forward from it, a close reading of the work of Friedrich Hayek, and wonderfully productive dialogues between Kant and Hesiod (in Ch. 3) and Nietzsche and Whitehead (in Ch. 4). A series of interludes open up the narrative and ideas from the main chapters in light of contemporary film, bridges and thermodynamic systems, and the idea of human “fullness” and vitality. A postlude explores the relations between belief, sensibility, role experimentation, and political activism. In short, The Fragility of Things is an inspiring and beautifully written work. For readers interested in STS in particular, it also offers a way to think with self-organizing systems in the service of reorienting our stories about (human and nonhuman) individuals, their relationships, and the larger networks of which they’re a part. Highly recommended! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory
30 Heinä 20141h 14min
David Hesmondhalgh, “Why Music Matters” (Wiley Blackwell, 2014)
What is the value of music and why does it matter? These are the core questions in David Hesmondhalgh‘s new book Why Music Matters (Wiley Blackwell, 2014). The book attempts a critical defence of music in the face of both uncritical populist post-modernism and more economistic neo-liberal understandings of music’s worth. Hesmondhalgh develops this critical defence of music by exploring its importance to individuals, to places, to communities and to nations, eventually engaging with the global aspects of music’s role and position in society. The book seeks to argue against some common positions in music, reasserting the importance of embodied experiences, such as dancing, whilst taking issue with the idea of the rock star as hero. Moreover Hesmondhalgh shows the social position and social structures surrounding music, whilst remaining attentive to the aesthetic qualities of both genres and individual pieces of music. Most notably the book is ambivalent about much of the promises claimed by the advocates of music’s transformative potential, but is never bleak, retaining a refreshing realism about the capacity of music to matter to people, publics and nations across the world. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory
19 Kesä 201440min
William Davies “The Limits of Neo-Liberalism: Authority, Sovereignty and the Logic of Competition” (Sage,
In his new book, The Limits of Neo-Liberalism: Authority, Sovereignty, and the Logic of Competition (Sage, 2014), William Davies, from Goldsmiths College University of London presents a detailed and challenging account of the dominant ideology of our age. The book’s five chapters chart the emergence of neo-liberalism within economics and political philosophy, through the international networks that were influential in propagating the ideas, to finally demonstrate, via the use of fieldwork in the US and Europe, how neo-liberalism exists in practice. The book is keen to move beyond the use of neo-liberalism as a mere description of events or practices that are disliked by parts of contemporary global political discourse. Neoliberalism, for Davies, is the pursuit of the disenchantment of politics by economics. The book shows how this plays out from the initial work of key neo-liberal thinkers, such as Hayek, to more recent defenses of neo-liberal approaches by governments, management theorists and think tanks in the post-crash era. Finally the book offers a reflection on the nature of contemporary critical sociology. Drawing on the work of Luc Boltanski, the French pragmatist sociologist, The Limits of Neo-Liberalism, shows the importance of description and history in setting out the structure of our current global settlement in order to challenge it. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory
29 Touko 201444min
M. Gail Hamner, “Imaging Religion in Film: The Politics of Nostalgia” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011
When we watch film various visual elements direct our understanding of the narrative and its meaning. The subjective position of each viewer informs their reading of images in a multitude of ways. From this perspective, religion can be imaged in film and may be found by viewers but its interpretation will depend upon the relationships between media and audience. In Imaging Religion in Film: The Politics of Nostalgia (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), M. Gail Hamner, Professor of Religion at Syracuse University, offers a dynamic theoretically informed methodology to examine the ethico-political dimensions of religion and film. She offers a semiotics of religion that relies on her reading of Charles Peirce and Gilles Deleuze, who aid us in thinking about how viewers react to and transform cinematic images. Through three case studies, including Akira Kurosawa’s Dersu Uzala (1972); Abbas Kiarostami’s Taste of Cherry (1997); and the Coen brothers’ The Man Who Wasn’t There (2001), she explores how religion is imaged in social and discursive fields through notions of nostalgia and transcendence. In our conversation we discuss postmodern aesthetics, the pedagogy of self, philosophical gelling through mechanical reproduction, the political economy of film, Deleuzian relations of gaze, situation, and reflection, the space between humanity and animality, confessional ways out of alienation, and ideas about how to watch a film. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory
19 Touko 201455min
Brett Scott, “The Heretic’s Guide to Global Finance: Hacking the Future of Money” (Pluto Press, 2013)
Brett Scott is the author of The Heretic’s Guide to Global Finance: Hacking the Future of Money (Pluto Press, 2013). Scott is a journalist, urban deep ecologist, and Fellow at the Finance Innovation Lab. While much of Scott’s book focuses on explaining various aspects of the financial services section, the heart of the book is a call to action. Scott infuses this call with a variety of first-hand experiences as a campaigner for radical approaches to disrupt the sector. For this reason, the book acts as a guide to activism, applicable for those interested in global finance, but also other domains that are ripe for criticism. His blog that he mentions at the end of the podcast can be found here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory
19 Touko 201428min
