Caleb Wellum, "Energizing Neoliberalism: The 1970s Energy Crisis and the Making of Modern America" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2023)

More and more of the world is living in cities, yet we rarely stop to examine how our spaces are organised and controlled. In a remarkable new book, Explore Everything: Place-Hacking the City (Verso, 2013), Bradley Garrett tells the story of his urban explorations that attempt to show the space from an entirely new viewpoint. The book draws on ethnographic fieldwork with a community of urban explores that begins in London and takes on global sites in the development of what the book refers to as ‘place hacking’. The explorers unearth the hidden histories of the London Underground, experience sites (and sights) of seemingly closed neo-liberal capital’s constructions and point to ways that the city could be a space for creativity beyond the blandness of coffee and consumer culture. Fundamentally Explore Everything aims to ensure we never look at our city spaces in the same ways again. Unusually for a book informed by critical theory, the text is richly illustrated with photographs taken as part of the place hacking activities, connecting the theoretical underpinnings of the text with the breathtaking excitement generated in the act of exploration. The text is also a record of the engagement with activism, police forces and security, as well as the media, raising profound questions as to the future role of the university and scholarship in an age where academia is encouraged and expected to have much more visible public impact. 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 Apr 201446min

Sarah Franklin‘s new book is an exceptionally rich, focused yet wide-ranging, insightful account of in vitro fertilization (IVF) and the worlds that it creates and inhabits. Biological Relatives: IVF, Stem Cells, and the Future of Kinship (Duke University Press, 2013) treats IVF as a looking-glass in which can see not only ourselves, but also transformations in modern notions of biology, technology, and kinship. In addition to a fascinating ethnography of the various kinds of work (by artists, by scientists, by patients and doctors) at IVF and stem cell research facilities, readers will find insightful explorations of the work of Marx and Engels, Haraway, Plato, Strathern, Derrida, Firestone, along with a wide range of authors of feminist texts from the 1980s and after. It is a book full of hands, socks, pipettes, eggs, screens, organisms, and arguments, it is fascinating, and it was a great pleasure to talk with Sarah about 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

9 Mar 20141h 6min

So much of Science Studies, of STS as a field or a point of engagement, is deeply concerned with objects. We create sociologies and networks of and with objects, we study them as actors or agents or actants, we worry about our relationships to them and their relationships to each other. We wonder if humans and their objects are really so different, or whether we are all octopuses shrinking behind our own ink. In Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World (University of Minnesota Press, 2013), Timothy Morton offers a way of thinking with and about hyperobjects, particular kinds of things of which we see only pieces at any given moment. (Though by the end of the book, Morton invites us to consider that perhaps every object is a hyperobject.) Hyperobjects have a number of qualities in common, and the first half of Morton’s book introduces and explores them: they stick to other beings, and they potentially transform our taken-for-granted notions of time, space, locality, causality, and the possibility of ever being “away.” How this all happens is explained in a wonderfully personal and engaging narrative voice that ranges from Heidegger to The Lord of the Rings to the Tardis to Op Art, and the second half of the book introduces some of the consequences of and opportunities created by thinking with hyperobjects. It is about global warming and intimacy and object-oriented ontology and modern art and the possibilities of a phenomenology after we get rid of any notion of “the world” as something out-there and beyond-us. For those who are interested in STS and its environs, it offers a very different and very thoughtful language for articulating narratives beyond a simple “object agency” frame or a human/object binary. It’s also a great pleasure to read. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

23 Feb 20141h 11min

The British Marxist economist Maurice Dobb is now largely forgotten. That’s too bad for a number of reasons. He was a brilliant thinker who wrote some of the most insightful analyses of the development and workings of capitalism around. You can still read his work and profit. He was the intellectual godfather of several notable British Marxist historians of the “New Left” of the 1960s and 1970s: Rodney Hilton, Christopher Hill, E.P. Thompson, among others. And, perhaps most importantly, his life gives us a window into a forgotten time, one in which a economists took communism seriously and fellows at Cambridge could earnestly believe in a bright communist future. This, I think, is a time we must not forget. Thanks to Timothy Shenk‘s well-researched, readable biography Maurice Dobb: Political Economist (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2013), we won’t have to. Shenk tells Dobb’s tale in all its tortured complexity. A member of the establishment and an anti-establishmentarian. A dyed-in-the-wool Marxist and a deadly serious empirically-oriented economist. A supporter of the Soviet Union and a critic of Soviet power. Listen in. 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 Feb 20141h 3min

Narrative, Identity, and the Map of Cultural Policy: Once Upon a Time in a Globalized World (Ashgate, 2013), a new book by Constance DeVereaux (Colorado State University) and Martin Griffin (University of Tennessee) sets out to challenge assumptions about policy making and culture in the contemporary world. The book has, at its centre, an understanding of narrative as both a practice that is central to what it means to be human and an analytical tool for understanding policy and culture. The book uses a wide range of case studies to illustrate the importance of this dual understanding of narrative to account for debates and differences between understandings of global culture as potentially threatening, in the form of globalization, or liberating, in the form of transnationalism. The case studies range from film and media studies, historical examples of Berlin and the USA’s National Endowment for the Arts, as well as questions over cultural heritage, through to readings of fictional case studies using the same narrative methods. The book will be essential reading for all scholars working in cultural policy and cultural studies, but also represents a challenge to the mainstream approaches of political science thinking about public policy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

14 Feb 201453min

The intersection of empirical research and critical theory is the basis for Anastasia Karandinou‘s new book No Matter: Theories and Practices of the Ephemeral in Architecture (Ashgate, 2013). The book takes as its starting point the growth of interest in ephemeral aspects of architecture, for example sound or time, which has arisen during the era of social and digital media. The two developments are interconnected across the book’s attempt to disrupt the traditional binary hierarchies dominant in architectural theory. Drawing on Derrida, Benjamin and Deluze, alongside a range of architects and architectural theorists, No Matter raises questions about the dominance of the visual over the non-visual; the formal over the material; and the physical over the digital. The range of empirical case studies used to illustrate the instability of the theoretical divisions ranges from audio projects in Edinburgh, Scotland to performative mapping in Shanghai, China. As a result of both its theoretical basis and its use of case study material, No Matter will interest anyone who wants to know more about the intersection of the built environment around us and the digital world that we use to live our lives. 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 Jan 201447min

In his new book Making Culture, Changing Society (Routledge, 2013), Professor Tony Bennett aims to change the way we think about culture. The book uses four core ideas about the nature and meaning of culture to present a view that does not see culture as just a set of signs and symbols. Rather culture is a form of knowledge practice, bound up with material conditions and institutions, which is implicated in the production of persons and freedoms. Making Culture, Changing Society justifies this view of culture in two ways. In the first instance the book considers how specific humanities disciplines, associated with anthropology and aesthetics, have been used to distribute ideas of freedom and ideas of the person within liberal government. Bennett uses examples from anthropological studies of colonial societies, along with discussions of the role of aesthetics for theorists such as Pierre Bourdieu, to show the function of culture and its interdependence with forms of knowledge. At the same time the book insists on the material aspects of these discussions, using the example of Melbourne’s National Museum of Victoria and Paris’ Musee de l’Homme. The book offers an important intervention into debates on culture and public policy, grounding questions of rights and representations within the historical project of liberal government. Moreover it develops a critique of the assumptions surrounding culture as a potentially positive or beneficial force for social change, raising profound questions for public, politics and policy. 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 Nov 20131h 4min

What is noise? In his new book Noise Matters: Towards an Ontology of Noise (Bloomsbury Academic, 2013), Greg Hainge, Reader in French at University of Queensland, Australia, explores this question. The book is written within the tradition of critical theory and is at once playful and punning, as well as suffused with challenging and perceptive analysis. The core position of the book is that we need to move beyond the dichotomous understanding of noise that sees it as either something to be removed or rejected, an unnecessary distraction from a core signal, or something that should be celebrated, but in celebration co-opted into being something that isn’t noise. For Hainge we need a new understanding of noise, an understanding that seeks to celebrate noise through a range of engagements with cultural and theoretical phenomena. Noise is not just about sound, but figures in all forms of communication. The book takes on the accepted readings of work in music, such as John Cage’s 4’33”, literature, such as Sartre’s Nausea, as well as photography and film. These new approaches, mediated by the concern with noise, will be of interest to a range of readers from across the humanities, as well as for specialists in film and music theory and aesthetics. The project of founding on ontology of noise is also a contribution to the growing field of noise studies, which is the kind of interdisciplinary academic area that is emerging within the noisy world of the contemporary academy.   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 Okt 201341min