Geoffrey McCormack and Thom Workman, “The Servant State: Overseeing Capital Accumulation in Canada” (Fernwood, 2015)
Two Canadian political science professors contend that the grotesque inequities of the capitalist system feed hatred, nourish misogyny, promote chronic dispossession and wreak havoc on the environment. In their new book, The Servant State: Overseeing Capital Accumulation in Canada, (Fernwood, 2015), Geoffrey McCormack and Thom Workman, add that [o]nly when humanity moves beyond this system of social and natural exploitation will the well-being of all improve. Their book suggests, however, that moving beyond capitalism in advanced, industrial countries will not be easy since such states are ruled by governments that consistently serve the interests of the capitalist business class, helping it accumulate the machinery and equipment that are the means of capitalist production. They argue that the capitalist state also reinforces the coercive nature of capitalism with labour market policies designed to force workers into accepting jobs even if they’re poorly paid and insecure. In The Servant State, McCormack and Workman focus on how Canada weathered the global financial crisis of 2008. The book examines why Canada fared better economically than the U.S. and outlines the steps the Canadian government took to serve and protect capitalism during its latest crisis. Drawing on Marxian theory, the authors seek to move beyond what they describe as the smooth and oftentimes complacent discourse about Canadian capitalism to focus instead on the essential nature of the capitalist system. They write, this study embraces the spirit of rejection rather than indignation, the spirit of repudiation rather than conciliation. Geoffrey McCormack is assistant professor of political science at Wheelock College in Boston while Thom Workman teaches in the political science department at the University of New Brunswick, Fredericton. They spoke to the New Books Network at the university library in Sackville, New Brunswick. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory
15 Kesä 201655min
Jeremy Ahearne, “Government through Culture and the Contemporary French Right” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014)
How did two right wing presidents use culture to govern France? In Government through Culture and the Contemporary French Right (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), Jeremy Ahearne, a Professor of French Studies and Cultural Policy Studies at the University of Warwick, explores are range of examples to probe the decade of Right Wing government between 2002 and 2012. Drawing on the implicit/explicit distinction in cultural policy studies, Ahearne considers how core cultural concepts have changed in France, for example the French idea of ‘laicity’ and state secularism, as well as discussing specific cultural examples. These include television and media policy, museum building, eduction policy and the political uses of French history. Overall the book is framed by the continuities and differences between the Chriac and Sarkozy regimes in France, along with the struggle for hegemony over culture and thus over government. The book will be of interest to cultural policy, cultural and media studies and French scholars, as well as those interested in examples of the governmental use of culture. Dave O’Brien is the host of New Books In Critical Theory and is a Senior Lecturer in Cultural Policy at the Institute for Cultural and Creative Entrepreneurship, Goldsmiths College, University of London. His research covers a range of areas between sociology and political science, including work on the British Civil Service, British Cultural Policy, cultural labour, and urban regeneration. His most recent books are Cultural Policy: Management, Value and Modernity in the Creative Industries and After Urban Regeneration (edited with Dr. Peter Matthews). He tweets @Drdaveobrien. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory
8 Kesä 201639min
Alfred Frankowski, “The Post-Racial Limits of Memorialization: Towards a Political Sense of Mourning” (Lexington Press, 2015)
How are cultural practices that suggest social inclusion at the root of marginalizing social suffering? In The Post-Racial Limits of Memorialization: Towards a Political Sense of Mourning (Lexington Books, 2015), Alfred Frankowski, an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Northeastern Illinois University, makes clear this central tension at the heart of contemporary American life. The re-election of Barack Obama and the murder of Trayvon Martin form the backdrop to Frankowski’s exploration of both the philosophical aesthetics and the practical manifestations of race in America today. From these two events the book moves to consider examples from Kantian aesthetic theory, through the history of memorials and museums, to examples from music, to illustrate how, in memorializing the past, we may forget both lessons and insights into current social struggles. The first book in a new series on the Philosophy of Race, The Post-Racial Limits of Memorialization: Towards a Political Sense of Mourning will be of interests to philosophers and cultural theorists, as well as those considering questions of race in society. Dave O’Brien is the host of New Books In Critical Theory and is a Senior Lecturer in Cultural Policy at the Institute for Cultural and Creative Entrepreneurship, Goldsmiths College, University of London. His research covers a range of areas between sociology and political science, including work on the British Civil Service, British Cultural Policy, cultural labour, and urban regeneration. His most recent books are Cultural Policy: Management, Value and Modernity in the Creative Industries and After Urban Regeneration (edited with Dr. Peter Matthews). He tweets @Drdaveobrien Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory
2 Kesä 201644min
Katie Gentile, ed., “The Business of Being Made” (Routledge, 2015)
In this interview, Dr. Katie Gentile discusses the research, writing and creative thinking about compulsory parenthood and Assisted Reproductive Technologies (or ARTs) that animate the essays appearing in The Business of Being Made: The Temporalities of Reproductive Technologies in Psychoanalysis and Culture (Routledge, 2015). It is striking that while personhood amendments proliferate and sovereignty over the reproductive body shifts frighteningly more and more to the State, a global, bio-medical industrial complex has arisen comprising ARTs, surrogate pregnancy, egg/sperm donation and the like. Gentile points out the rise of the post-9/11 fetishization of the fetus a receptacle for all our vulnerabilities which must be protected at all costs in the face of the hyper-object: the threat of global catastrophe looming large. ARTs and its associated industries manufacture hope and optimism in conceiving babies at any cost (for those of privilege) while serving to further elevate, protect and fetishize the fetus. It’s a space of repro-futurity in which life is constructed around achieving reproductive milestones. ARTs have become another neoliberal trope to imagine life without limits as they have been subsumed into ordinary medicine for all women. With ARTs there is often no space to acknowledge loss, shame, uncertainty and the sexual re-traumatization that often occur during the process. On the plus side, ARTs offer the promise and opportunity of biological parenthood to marginalized people (for example, trans men) resulting in diverse family configurations. Gentile asks can other spaces be nurtured so that babies are not the main focus of generativity, especially for women? How can we better theorize childfree lives of creativity that are not seen as displaced parenting but generativity for its own pleasure? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory
28 Touko 201652min
Nicholas Vrousalis, “The Political Philosophy of G.A. Cohen: Back to Socialist Basics” (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015)
In his book The Political Philosophy of G.A. Cohen: Back to Socialist Basics (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015), Nicholas Vrousalis (Leiden University) provides a thorough and complex reconstruction of G.A. Cohen’s political philosophical project. Understanding Cohen to be engaged in “secular egalitarian theodicy,” Vrousalis threads together the major dimensions of Cohen’s thought to find unity in Cohen’s philosophy. The book and the interview take up the concepts central to Cohen’s work – historical materialism, freedom, equality, exploitation, community, and socialism – in a way that explores the tensions, resonances, and changes that persist across Cohen’s writings. Along the way, Vrousalis analyzes Cohen’s polemical engagements with other major political philosophers, such as John Rawls, Ronald Dworkin, Amartya Sen, Robert Nozick, and more, all as examples of Cohen’s “immanent” philosophical method. John McMahon is a Doctoral Candidate in Political Science at The Graduate Center, CUNY, where he has also completed the Women’s Studies Certificate. He is a Fellow at the Center for Global Ethics and Politics at the Ralph Bunche Institute for International Studies at The Graduate Center, which co-sponsors the podcast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory
17 Touko 201659min
Bernard Harcourt, “Exposed: Desire and Disobedience in the Digital Age” (Harvard UP, 2015)
The landscape described in Bernard Harcourt‘s new book is a dystopia saturated by pleasure. We do not live in a drab Orwellian world, he writes. We live in a beautiful, colorful, stimulating, digital world a rich, bright world full of passion and jouissance–and by means of which we reveal ourselves and make ourselves virtually transparent to surveillance. Exposed: Desire and Disobedience in the Digital Age (Harvard University Press, 2015) guides us through our new digital age, one that makes it so easy for others to monitor, profile, and shape our every desire. We are building what he calls the expository society a platform for unprecedented levels of exhibition, watching, and influence that is reconfiguring our political relations and reshaping our notions of what it means to be an individual. Other actors from advertisers to government agencies can compile huge amounts of information about who we are and what we do. Whether they use it to recommend other products to buy or track our movements, Harcourt argues that the influence and interests of other actors is often hidden from us. Despite leaks of classified materials about the extent of this surveillance, public outrage is limited and mild. The scale of data collection and tracking is not a national let alone a global scandal. According to Exposed, are appetites are too well satisfied and our attentions too distracted. Harcourt prods us to practice digital disobedience, lest we will remain in a digital mesh that will only continue to restrict our privacy and anonymity underneath its beautiful, shiny suit. John Balz is Director of Strategy at VML, a full-service marketing agency with offices around the globe. He has spent his career applying behavioral science strategies in the marketing and advertising field through direct mail and email, display and .coms, mobile messaging, e-commerce and social media. You can follow him on Twitter @Nudgeblog and contact him at nudgeblog@gmail.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory
17 Touko 20161h 10min
Malcolm James, “Urban Multiculture: Youth, Politics and Transformations in a Global City” (Palgrave, 2015)
How is youth culture changing in a globalised city? In Urban Multiculture: Youth, Politics and Transformations in a Global City Malcolm James, a lecturer at the University of Sussex, introduces the concept of Urban Multiculture as a framework for understanding his ethnographic research in East London. The book considers memory, territory and cultural practice, thinking through how the politics of class and race, alongside the lived experience of young people in the area, are being reconfigured by technology. This reconfiguration takes place in the context of global flows of people and culture, in a contested and transforming East London. The book demonstrates the importance of ethnographic research, both to how we understand and do politics, and to how we understand the contemporary city. It will be of interested to any scholar of urban studies, as well as those working on youth, race and class. Dave OBrien is the host of New Books In Critical Theory and is a Senior Lecturer in Cultural Policy at the Institute for Cultural and Creative Entrepreneurship, Goldsmiths College, University of London. His research covers a range of areas between sociology and political science, including work on the British Civil Service, British Cultural Policy, cultural labour, and urban regeneration. His most recent books are Cultural Policy: Management, Value and Modernity in the Creative Industries and After Urban Regeneration (edited with Dr Peter Matthews). He tweets@Drdaveobrien Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory
16 Touko 201641min
Garrett M. Broad, “More Than Just Food: Food Justice and Community Change” (U of California Press, 2016)
Resistance to the industrial food system has, over the past decades, led to the rise of alternative food movements. Debate about genetically modified food, sugar consumption, fast food and the obesity crisis (to name a few) is pervasive. Most often, this focuses on individual consumer choice. Garrett M.Broad argues, however, for the importance of community level initiative. He maintains that the vote with your fork movement obscures the structural foundation of the corporate food system. The alternative food movements, as a whole, fail to recognize that the inequities in the food system are connected to histories of racial and economic discrimination. Broad’s book More Than Just Food: Food Justice and Community Change (University of California Press, 2016) examines the work of community-based food justice groups operating in South Los Angeles, like Community Services Unlimited (CSU). Founded as an arm of the South California Black Panther Party, CSU organizes at a grassroots level to provide community access to food, while using food as a means to foster consciousness and promote a broader movement for social justice. More Than Just Food narrates the stories of these organizations, evaluates the pitfalls and possibilities of community-level initiative, and highlights the problematic position of local groups working with national non-profit organizations, and governmental and corporate agencies. Through his engaged scholarship and nuanced analysis, Broad offers us a study of specific movements in their local context and makes recommendations to help future movements organize and act effectively. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory
13 Touko 201655min
