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The freedom of the individual to aim high is a deeply rooted part of the American ethos but we rarely acknowledge its flip side: failure. If people are responsible for their individual successes, is the same true of their failures? The Failed Individual brings together a variety of disciplinary approaches to explore how people fail in the United States and the West at large, whether economically, politically, socially, culturally, or physically. How do we understand individual failure, especially in the context of the zero-sum game of international capitalism? And what new spaces of resistance, or even pleasure, might failure open up for people and society?
Based on papers originally presented at a 2009 conference hosted at the John-F.-Kennedy-Institut of the Freie Univet'at Berlin.
From Finding to Making offers the first detailed discussion of the relationship between Marxism and pragmatism. These two philosophies of praxis are not incompatible, and an analysis of their relation helps one to better understand both. Establishing a transatlantic theoretical dialogue, this book discusses similarities and differences between these philosophies. It is an interdisciplinary study that brings together philosophy, American and European intellectual history, and literary studies. Schulenberg’s book shows that if we seek to continue the unfinished project of establishing a genuinely postmetaphysical culture, the attempt to elucidate the dialectics of Marxism and pragmatism is a good starting point. The book offers detailed discussions of Sidney Hook, Georg Lukács, Theodor W. Adorno, Fredric Jameson, W.E.B. Du Bois, John Dewey, Richard Rorty, and Jacques Rancière.
This book presents a rich and nuanced analysis of selfie culture. It shows how selfies gain their meanings, illustrates different selfie practices, explores how selfies make us feel and why they have the power to make us feel anything, and unpacks how selfie practices and selfie related norms have changed or might change in the future.
Available Open Access digitally under CC-BY-ND licence This book pulls back the curtain on the link between activism, media and technology in the quiet times of politics when people are not protesting. Introducing the novel concept of the ‘data stream', it explores the intricate ways in which activists interact daily with various types of data and how they navigate the impact of digitalization and datafication on today’s grassroots politics. Through rich, empirical data from Greece, Spain and Italy, Activists in the Data Stream makes a nuanced contribution to our understanding of activists’ daily political engagement in an ever-changing media and political landscape.
Counternarrative Possibilities reads Cormac McCarthy's Westerns against the backdrop of two formative tropes in American mythology: virgin land (from the 1950s) and homeland (after '9/11' ). Looking at McCarthy's Westerns in the context of American Studies, James Dorson shows how his novels counter the national narratives underlying these tropes and reinvest them with new, potentially transformative meaning. Departing from prevailing accounts of McCarthy that place him in relation to his literary antecedents, Counternarrative Possibilities takes a forwardlooking approach that reads McCarthy's work as a key influence on millennial fiction. Weaving together disciplinary history with longstanding debates over the relationship between aesthetics and politics, this book is at once an exploration of the limits of ideology critique in the twenty-first century and an original reconsideration of McCarthy's work 'after postmodernism'.
The Oxford Handbook of Sociology for Social Justice presents an alternative approach to sociological research that begins with community engagement and political commitments focused on social justice. The collection includes international case studies of students and faculty partnered with labor unions, farmers and farmworkers, activists Of many stripes, and others who not only use their social science skills to support social justice work, but also recognize how these movements impact our understanding of sociology to begin with.
Hostis humani generis, meaning "enemy of humankind," is the legal basis by which Western societies have defined such criminals as pirates, torturers, or terrorists as beyond the pale of civilization. Sonja Schillings argues that the legal fiction designating certain persons or classes of persons as enemies of all humankind does more than characterize them as inherently hostile: it supplies a narrative basis for legitimating violence in the name of the state. The book draws attention to a century-old narrative pattern that not only underlies the legal category of enemies of the people, but more generally informs interpretations of imperial expansion, protest against structural oppression, and the transformation of institutions as "legitimate" interventions on behalf of civilized society. Schillings traces the Anglo-American interpretive history of the concept, which she sees as crucial to understanding US history, in particular with regard to the frontier, race relations, and the war on terror.
A compelling look at the lives of ultra-Orthodox and formerly ultra-Orthodox Jewish women and their use of media technologies to create a new market for music and film Mainstream portrayals of ultra-Orthodox religious women often frame their faith as oppressive: they are empowered only when they leave their community. This book flips this notion on its head. Drawing on six years of fieldwork between New York and Montreal, Jessica Roda examines modern performances on the stage and screen directed by and for ultra-Orthodox women. Their incredibly vibrant Jewish artistic scenes defy stereotypes that paint these women as repressed, reclusive to their shtetl (village), and devoid of creativity an...
As the material anchors of globalization, North America’s global port cities channel flows of commodities, capital, and tourists. This book explores how economic globalization processes have shaped these cities' political institutions, social structures, and urban identities since the mid-1970s. Although the impacts of financialization on global cities have been widely discussed, it is curious that how the global integration of commodity chains actually happens spatially — creating a quantitatively new, global organization of production, distribution, and consumption processes — remains understudied. The book uses New York City, Los Angeles, Vancouver, and Montreal as case studies of how once-redundant spaces have been reorganized, and crucially, reinterpreted, so as to accommodate new flows of goods and people — and how, in these processes, social, environmental, and security costs of global production networks have been shifted to the public.