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Foundations of Critical Media and Information Studies
Foundations of Critical Media and Information Studies lays down foundations for the analysis of media, information, and information technology in 21st century information society, as well as introducing the theoretical and empirical tools necessary for the critical study of media and information. Christian Fuchs shows the role classical critical theory can play for analyzing the information society and the information economy, as well as analyzing the role of the media and the information economy in economic development, the new imperialism, and the new economic crisis. The book critically discusses transformations of the Internet (‘web 2.0’), introduces the notion of alternative media as critical media, and shows the critical role media and information technology can play in contemporary society. This book provides an excellent introduction to the study of media, information technology, and information society, making it a valuable reference tool for both undergraduate and postgraduate students of subjects such as Media Studies, Sociology of Media, Social Theory, and New Media.
Critical Ecologies
Environmental movements are the subject of increasingly rigorous political theoretical study. Can the Frankfurt School's critical frameworks be used to address ecological issues, or do environmental conflicts remain part of the "failed promise" of this group? Critical Ecologies aims to redeem the theories of major Frankfurt thinkers--Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, and Herbert Marcuse, among others--by applying them to contemporary environmental crises. Critical Ecologies argues that sustainability and critical social theory have many similar goals, including resistance to different forms of domination. Like the Frankfurt School itself, the essays in this volume reflect a spirit of interdisciplinarity and draw attention to intersections between environmental, socio-political, and philosophical issues. Offering textual analyses by leading scholars in both critical theory and environmental politics, Critical Ecologies underscores the continued relevance of the Frankfurt School's ideas for addressing contemporary issues.
Habermas
This book follows postwar Germany's leading philosopher and social thinker, Jürgen Habermas, through four decades of political and constitutional struggle over the shape of liberal democracy in Germany. Habermas's most influential theories - of the public sphere, communicative action, and modernity - were decisively shaped by major West German political events: the failure to de-Nazify the judiciary, the rise of a powerful Constitutional Court, student rebellions in the late 1960s, the changing fortunes of the Social Democratic Party, NATO's decision to station nuclear weapons, and the unexpected collapse of East Germany. In turn, Habermas's writings on state, law, and constitution played a critical role in reorienting German political thought and culture to a progressive liberal-democratic model. Matthew Specter uniquely illuminates the interrelationship between the thinker and his culture.
Capitalism and Its Legitimacy in Times of Crisis
This volume examines why the 2008 financial crisis with the subsequent Great Recession did not foster a major institutional transformation of the capitalist market economy. It highlights the role of ideas and public discourse in explaining institutional stability and change in the wake of economic crises and other critical junctures. Examining legitimation discourse in four OECD countries (Germany, Switzerland, the United Kingdom and the United States) between 1998 and 2011, the contributions to the volume use different text-analytical methods to bring out the ideas that underpin affirmative and critical media discourse on the capitalist regime. Individual chapters focus on the contours and ...
Rethinking Democracy
For years, intellectuals have argued that, with the triumph of capitalist, liberal democracy, the Western World has reached “the end of history.” Recently, however, there has been a rise of authoritarian politics in many countries. Concepts of post-democracy, anti-politics, and the like are gaining currency in theoretical and political debate. Now that capitalist democracies are facing seismic and systemic challenges, it becomes increasingly important to investigate not only the inherent antagonism between liberalism and the democratic process, but also socialism. Is socialism an enemy of democracy? Could socialism develop, expand, even enhance democracy? While this volume seeks a reappraisal of existing liberal democracy today, its main goal is to help lay the foundation for new visions and practices in developing a real socialist democracy. Amid the contradictions of neoliberal capitalism today, the responsibility to sort out the relationship between socialism and democracy has never been greater. No revival of socialist politics in the twenty-first century can occur without founding new democratic institutions and practices.
The Cultural Politics of Anti-Elitism
This book examines the highly ambivalent implications and effects of anti-elitism. It draws on this theme as a cross-cutting entry point to provide transdisciplinary analysis of current conjunctures and their contradictions, drawing on examples from popular culture and media, politics, fashion, labour and spatial arrangements. Using the toolboxes of media and discourse analysis, hegemony theory, ethnography, critical social psychology and cultural studies more broadly, the book surveys and theorizes the forms, the implications and the ambiguities and limits of anti-elitist formations in different parts of the world. Anti-elitist sentiments colour the contemporary political conjuncture as muc...
Capitalism and Labor
"Social theory has largely abandoned a focus on labor and with it its empirical foundation, while the sociology of work has neglected the production of theory more generally. It is for precisely this reason that Capitalism and labor has become a standard work on this subject. Labor and employment relations have become both increasingly diverse as well as less secure while, at the same time, labor and distributional struggles are being waged ever more fiercely. Adequately grasping these changes requires innovative impulses emerging from the analysis of capitalism, just as the sociology of work has a lot to contribute to the former. In this translated and updated edition the authors discuss current theoretical approachers in an attempt to once again conceive capitalism and labor together"--Back cover.
Critical Theory and the Critique of Political Economy
Subversive thought is none other than the cunning of reason when confronted with a social reality in which the poor and miserable are required to sustain the illusion of fictitious wealth. Yet, this subsidy is absolutely necessary in existing society, to prevent its implosion. The critique of political economy is a thoroughly subversive business. It rejects the appearance of economic reality as a natural thing, argues that economy has not independent existence, expounds economy as political economy, and rejects as conformist rebellion those anti-capitalist perspectives that derive their rationality from the existing conceptuality of society. Subversion focuses on human conditions. Its critical subject is society unaware of itself. This book develops Marx's critique of political economy as negative theory of society. It does not conform to the patterns of the world and demands that society rids itself of all the muck of ages and founds itself anew.
Worlds of Labour Turned Upside Down
This volume offers a bold restatement of the importance of social history for understanding modern revolutions. The essays collected in Worlds of Labour Turned Upside Down provide global case studies examining: - changes in labour relations as a causal factor in revolutions; - challenges to existing labour relations as a motivating factor during revolutions; - the long-term impact of revolutions on the evolution of labour relations. The volume examines a wide range of revolutions in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, covering examples from South-America, Africa, Asia, and Western and Eastern Europe. The volume goes beyond merely examining the place of industrial workers, paying attention to the position of slaves, women working on the front line of civil war, colonial forced labourers, and white collar workers. Contributors are: Knud Andresen, Zsombor Bódy, Pepijn Brandon, Dimitrii Churakov, Gabriel Di Meglio, Kimmo Elo, Adrian Grama, Renate Hürtgen, Peyman Jafari, Marcel van der Linden, Tiina Lintunen, João Carlos Louçã, Stefan Müller, Raquel Varela, and Felix Wemheuer.
The Future of Difference
The Future of Difference theorises contemporary regimes of power as engaged primarily in the violent production of difference. In this moment, the logic of ‘other and rule’ thoroughly permeates the social and the political; our contemporary condition is increasingly premised on endless subtle hierarchical distinctions, which determine whole populations’ attitudes, feelings and actions. Hark and Villa make a compelling case for the detoxification of public and political discourse, in favor of an ethical mode of living-with the world, that is, living with plurality and alterity.
