Alfie Bown, “Enjoying It: Candy Crush and Capitalism” (Zero Books, 2015)

Alfie Bown, “Enjoying It: Candy Crush and Capitalism” (Zero Books, 2015)

What is enjoyment and what can contemporary critical theory tell us about it? In Enjoying It: Candy Crush and Capitalism (Zero Books, 2015), Alfie Bown, a lecturer at Hang Seng Management College and co-editor of Everyday Analysis and the Hong Kong Review of Books, talks through the political potential of new forms of enjoyment. Using Candy Crush Saga, Football Manager, Gangnam Style, Game of Thrones, and the act of reading critical theory itself, the book argues we need to take enjoyment seriously. Enjoyment is understood in relation to work and capitalism, unpacking ideas of productive and unproductive enjoyment and how they might serve or subvert power and control in modern life. The book will be of interest to scholars across philosophy, literary studies, and the social sciences, alongside anyone with a smart phone, tablet or love of the television box set! 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

Episoder(2227)

Alex Prichard, "Anarchism: a Very Short Introduction" (Oxford UP, 2022)

Alex Prichard, "Anarchism: a Very Short Introduction" (Oxford UP, 2022)

If you asked a passerby on the street what anarchism is, they may answer that it is an ideology based on chaos, disorder, and violence. But is this true? What exactly is anarchism? Anarchism: a Very S...

7 Feb 55min

Olivier Esteves et al., "France, You Love It but Leave It: The Silent Flight of French Muslims" (Polity, 2025)

Olivier Esteves et al., "France, You Love It but Leave It: The Silent Flight of French Muslims" (Polity, 2025)

Their names are Mohamed, Samira, sometimes Matthieu or Sophie. They were born and bred in France and are highly qualified, but they have decided to go and live in London or New York, Montreal or Bruss...

6 Feb 57min

Patricia Daley and Ian Klinke, "Human Geography: A Very Short Introduction" (Oxford UP, 2025)

Patricia Daley and Ian Klinke, "Human Geography: A Very Short Introduction" (Oxford UP, 2025)

Human geography offers answers to some of the most important challenges of our time. To understand contemporary struggles over global economic inequality, forced migration, racial injustice, gender ju...

5 Feb 1h 7min

Kevin Hart, "Lands of Likeness: For a Poetics of Contemplation" (U Chicago Press, 2023)

Kevin Hart, "Lands of Likeness: For a Poetics of Contemplation" (U Chicago Press, 2023)

In Lands of Likeness: For a Poetics of Contemplation (U Chicago Press, 2023), Kevin Hart develops a new hermeneutics of contemplation through a meditation on Christian thought and secular philosophy. ...

5 Feb 1h 17min

Samuel Holley-Kline, "In the Shadow of El Tajín: The Political Economy of Archaeology in Modern Mexico" (U Nebraska Press, 2025)

Samuel Holley-Kline, "In the Shadow of El Tajín: The Political Economy of Archaeology in Modern Mexico" (U Nebraska Press, 2025)

Located in the Papantla municipality of the Mexican state of Veracruz, El Tajín is a UNESCO World Heritage site but a lesser-known tourist destination and national symbol. The Indigenous Totonac resid...

4 Feb 45min

Lisa Min et al. eds., "Redacted: Writing in the Negative Space of the State" (punctum books, 2024)

Lisa Min et al. eds., "Redacted: Writing in the Negative Space of the State" (punctum books, 2024)

When it comes to the political, acts of redaction, erasure, and blacking out sit in awkward tension with the myth of transparent governance, borderless access, and frictionless communication. But shou...

4 Feb 1h 25min

Jacqueline Couti and Anny Dominique Curtius, "Women, Theory, Praxis, and Performativities: Transoceanic Entanglements in Francophone Settings" (Liverpool UP, 2025)

Jacqueline Couti and Anny Dominique Curtius, "Women, Theory, Praxis, and Performativities: Transoceanic Entanglements in Francophone Settings" (Liverpool UP, 2025)

Women, Theory, Praxis, and Performativities: Transoceanic Entanglements in Francophone Settings (Liverpool UP, 2025) bridges the gap between the Caribbean, the Indian Ocean and the Pacific. It collect...

3 Feb 1h 17min

Itohan I. Osayimwese, "Africa's Buildings: Architecture and the Displacement of Cultural Heritage" (Princeton UP, 2025)

Itohan I. Osayimwese, "Africa's Buildings: Architecture and the Displacement of Cultural Heritage" (Princeton UP, 2025)

Between the nineteenth century and today, colonial officials, collectors, and anthropologists dismembered African buildings and dispersed their parts to museums in Europe and the United States. Most o...

3 Feb 1h 19min

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