You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
Postgrowth Imaginaries brings together environmental cultural studies and postgrowth economics to examine radical cultural shifts sparked by the global financial crisis. The globalization of an economic culture addicted to constant growth destroys the ecological planetary systems while failing to fulfil its social promises. A transition toward what Prádanos calls ‘postgrowth imaginaries’—the counterhegemonic cultural sensibilities that are challenging the growth paradigm—is well underway in the Iberian Peninsula today.
Chronicling sixteenth-century Spain to the present day, Beyond Human aims to decentre the human and acknowledge the material historicity of more-than-human nature. The book explores key questions relating to ecological equity, justice, and responsibility within and beyond Spain in the Anthropocene. Examining relations between Iberian cultural practices, historical developments, and ecological processes, Maryanne L. Leone, Shanna Lino, and the contributors to this volume reveal the structures that uphold and dismantle the non-human–human dichotomy and nature-culture divide. The book critiques works from the Golden Age to the twenty-first century in a wide range of genres, including comedia,...
This volume is a scrapbook and an experiment. It collects the artifacts, written and otherwise, of a year’s worth of public workshops that put science and technology studies and affect studies together. Through zinemaking, collaging, foraging, fermenting, perfuming, and walking together, we do ordinary science from the kitchen table and work to materialize alternative futures. Putting STS and affect together bolsters literacies for how the world is being made and how we might make it differently.
An insightful exploration of the iconic Galápagos tortoises, and how their fate is inextricably linked to our own in a rapidly changing world The Galápagos archipelago is often viewed as a last foothold of pristine nature. For sixty years, conservationists have worked to restore this evolutionary Eden after centuries of exploitation at the hands of pirates, whalers, and island settlers. This book tells the story of the islands' namesakes--the giant tortoises--as coveted food sources, objects of natural history, and famous icons of conservation and tourism. By doing so, it brings into stark relief the paradoxical, and impossible, goal of conserving species by trying to restore a past state of prehistoric evolution. The tortoises, Elizabeth Hennessy demonstrates, are not prehistoric, but rather microcosms whose stories show how deeply human and nonhuman life are entangled. In a world where evolution is thoroughly shaped by global history, Hennessy puts forward a vision for conservation based on reckoning with the past, rather than trying to erase it.
Spain After the Indignados/15M Movement explores how the aftershocks of the 2007 Great Recession restructured Spain’s political sphere and political imaginary. It brings together a representative sample of Spain’s leading progressive voices, including two of the five founding members of the Podemos party. The essays herein explore the areas of economics, politics, ecology, social change, media, and cultural politics in order to present a broad, critical account of contemporary Spain, with a special emphasis on emerging forms of sociopolitical contestation, self-organizing, democratic participation, and radical politics. The edited volume argues that Spanish cultural studies—which originally gravitated toward celebratory accounts of capitalist modernization, the cultural Movida and the advent of a postmodern Spain—must continue to build a new cultural politics that not only challenges the accepted narrative of the Spanish Transition to democracy, but that is committed to confronting the civilizatory challenges currently faced.
This book undertakes a psychotropic analysis of texts that deal with the violence of drug trafficking and interdiction, especially in Mexico. While most critics of so-called narcoculture have either focused on an aesthetic “sobriety” in these works or discounted them altogether as exploitative and unworthy of serious attention, Drugs, Violence, and Latin America illuminates how such work may reflect and intervene in global networks of intoxication. Theorizing a “dialectics of intoxication” that illustrates how psychotropy may either solidify or destabilize the self and its relationship to the other, it proposes that these tendencies influence human behavior in distinct ways and are leveraged for social control within both licit and illicit economies. A consideration of a countercultural genealogy in Latin America provides a contrastive psychotropic context for contemporary novels that exposes links between narcoviolence and consumerism, challenging our addictions of thought and feeling about ourselves and our relationships to drugs and narco-violence.
An exploration of how writers, artists, and filmmakers expose the costs and contest the assumptions of the Capitalocene era that guides readers through the rapidly developing field of Spanish environmental cultural studies. From the scars left by Franco's dams and mines to the toxic waste dumped in Equatorial Guinea, from the cruelty of the modern pork industry to the ravages of mass tourism in the Balearic Islands, this book delves into the power relations, material practices and social imaginaries underpinning the global economic system to uncover its unaffordable human and non-human costs. Guiding the reader through the rapidly emerging field of Spanish environmental cultural studies, wit...
During the 2020 and 2021 phases of the global COVID-19 pandemic, there was significant prognostication regarding what internationalization in higher education would look like in its aftermath. Within the field of international education, many stated the need to reimagine internationalization in and of higher education in the face of severe budget cuts, restrictions on travel, and increased government protectionism in the face of growing nationalistic populism globally to name a few challenges. Absent from many of those discussions, however, were the voices of many leader-practitioners who have had to think flexibly about internationalization in higher education in order to sustain and grow p...
The Op-Ed Novel follows a clutch of globally renowned Spanish novelists who swept into the political sphere via the pages of El País. Their literary sensibility transformed opinion journalism, and their weekly columns changed their novels, which became venues for speculative historical claims, partisan political projects, and intellectual argument.
Understories: Plants and Culture in the American Tropics establishes the central importance of plants to the histories and cultures of the extended tropical region stretching from the U.S. South to Argentina. Through close examination of a number of significant plants – cacao, mate, agave, the hevea brasilensis, kudzu, the breadfruit, soy, and the ceiba pentandra, among others – this volume shows that vegetal life has played a fundamental role in shaping societies and in formulating cultural and environmental imaginaries in and beyond the region. Drawing on a wide range of cultural traditions and forms across literature, popular music, art, and film, the essays included in this volume transcend regional and linguistic boundaries to bring together multiple plant-centred histories or ‘understories’ – narratives that until now have been marginalized or gone unnoticed. Attending not only to the significant influence of humans on plants, but also of plants on humans, this book offers new understandings of how colonization, globalization, and power were, and continue to be, imbricated with nature in the American tropics.