Böcker i Forerunners: Ideas First-serien

A personal account of the aging body and advanced technologies by a preeminent philosopher of technologyMedical Technics is a rigorous examination of how medical progress has modified our worlds and contributed to a virtual revolution in longevity. Don Ihde offers a unique autobiographical tour of medical events experienced in a decade, beginning in his 70s. Ihde offers experiential and postphenomenological analyses of technologies such as sonography and microsurgery, and ultimately asks what it means to increasingly become a cyborg. Forerunners: Ideas FirstShort books of thought-in-process scholarship, where intense analysis, questioning, and speculation take the lead

Arne De Boever is faculty in the School of Critical Studies and director of the MA Aesthetics and Politics program at the California Institute of the Arts. His works include States of Exception in the Contemporary Novel, Narrative Care, Plastic Sovereignties, and Finance Fictions.

Joanna Zylinska is professor of new media and communications at Goldsmiths, University of London. She is a photomedia artist, curator, and author of several books.

The first comprehensive account of Bitcoin's underlying right-wing politics

Mobility studies scholar Christopher Schaberg considers the time leading up to the COVID-19 pandemic and the ensuing global plummet in commercial flight. Grounded blends journalistic reportage with cultural theory and philosophical inquiry in order to offer graspable insights as well as a stinging critique of contemporary air travel.

A complex articulation of the ways blackness and nonnormative gender intersect‿and a deeper understanding of how subjectivities are formed A deep meditation on and expansion of the figure of the Negro and insurrectionary effects of the “Xâ€? as theorized by Nahum Chandler, The Problem of the Negro as a Problem for Gender thinks through the problematizing effects of blackness as, too, a problematizing of gender. Through the paraontological, the between, and the figure of the “Xâ€? (with its explicit contemporary link to nonbinary and trans genders) Marquis Bey presents a meditation on black feminism and gender nonnormativity. Chandler‿s text serves as both an argumentative tool for rendering the “radical alternativeâ€? in and as blackness as well as demonstrating the necessarily trans/gendered valences of that radical alternative. Forerunners is a thought-in-process series of breakthrough digital works. Written between fresh ideas and finished books, Forerunners draws on scholarly work initiated in notable blogs, social media, conference plenaries, journal articles, and the synergy of academic exchange. This is gray literature publishing: where intense thinking, change, and speculation take place in scholarship.

A provocative peek into this complicated film as a space for subversion, activism, and imaginative powerWhile both fans and foes point to Mad Max: Fury Road’s feminist credentials, Furious Feminisms asks: is there really anything feminist or radical happening on the screen? The four authors—from backgrounds in art history, American literature, disability studies, and sociology—ask what is possible, desirable, or damaging in theorizing feminism in the contested landscape of the twenty-first century. Can we find beauty in the Anthropocene? Can power be wrested from a violent system without employing and perpetuating violence?┬áThis experiment in collaborative criticism weaves multiple threads of dialogue together to offer a fresh perspective on our current cultural moment.┬áForerunners: Ideas First Short books of thought-in-process scholarship, where intense analysis, questioning, and speculation take the lead

Nationality is not enough to understand “Latin”-descended populations in the United States LatinX has neither country nor fixed geography. LatinX, according to Claudia Milian, is the most powerful conceptual tool of the Latino/a present, an itinerary whose analytic routes incorporate the Global South and ecological devastation. Milian’s trailblazing study deploys the indeterminate but thunderous “X” as intellectual armor, a speculative springboard, and a question for our times that never stops being asked. LatinX sorts out and addresses issues about the unknowability of social realities that exceed our present knowledge.Forerunners: Ideas FirstShort books of thought-in-process scholarship, where intense analysis, questioning, and speculation take the lead

Using philosophical and scientific work to engage the perennial question of human nature  This book takes a look at the formation, and edges, of states: their breakdowns and attempts to repair them, and their encounters with non-state peoples. It draws upon anthropology, political philosophy, neuroscience, evolutionary biology, child developmental psychology, and other fields to look at states as projects of constructing “bodies politic,” where the civic and the somatic intersect. John Protevi asserts that humans are predisposed to “prosociality,” or being emotionally invested in social partners and patterns. With readings from Jean-Jacques Rousseau and James C. Scott; a critique of the assumption of widespread pre-state warfare as a selection pressure for the evolution of human prosociality and altruism; and an examination of the different “economies of violence” of state and non-state societies, Edges of the State sketches a notion of prosocial human nature and its attendant normative maxims. Forerunners: Ideas First Short books of thought-in-process scholarship, where intense analysis, questioning, and speculation take the lead

Steve Mentz is professor of English at St. John’s University. He is the author of Shipwreck Modernity (Minnesota, 2015), At the Bottom of Shakespeare’s Ocean (2009), and Romance for Sale in Early Modern England (2006).

Tracing the erosion of democratic norms in the US and the conditions that make it possible Jonathan Beecher Field tracks the permutations of the town hall meeting from its original context as a form of democratic community governance in New England into a format for presidential debates and a staple of corporate governance. In its contemporary iteration, the town hall meeting models the aesthetic of the former but replaces actual democratic deliberation with a spectacle that involves no immediate electoral stakes or functions as a glorified press conference. Urgently, Field notes that though this evolution might be apparent, evidence suggests many US citizens don’t care to differentiate. Forerunners: Ideas First Short books of thought-in-process scholarship, where intense analysis, questioning, and speculation take the lead

An investigation of how-to guides for sensor technologies Sensors are increasingly common within citizen-sensing and DIY projects, but these devices often require the use of a how-to guide. From online instructional videos for troubleshooting sensor installations to handbooks for using and abusing the Internet of Things, the how-to genres and formats of digital instruction continue to expand and develop. As the how-to proliferates, and instructions unfold through multiple aspects of technoscientific practices, Jennifer Gabrys asks why the how-to has become one of the prevailing genres of the digital. How to Do Things with Sensors explores the ways in which things are made do-able with and through sensors and further considers how worlds are made sense-able and actionable through the instructional mode of citizen-sensing projects.Forerunners: Ideas FirstShort books of thought-in-process scholarship, where intense analysis, questioning, and speculation take the lead

Naa Oyo A. Kwate is associate professor of Africana studies and human ecology at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey.

Matthew J. Wolf-Meyer is associate professor of anthropology at Binghamton University. He is author of The Slumbering Masses: Sleep, Medicine, and Modern American Life (Minnesota, 2012).

Kathryn Yusoff is Professor of Inhuman Geography at Queen Mary University of London.

Drawing up alternate ways to “make a living” beyond capitalism To live in this world is to be conditioned by capital. Once paired with Western democracy, unfettered capitalism has led to a shrinking economic system that squeezes out billions of people—creating a planet of surplus populations. Wageless Life is a manifesto for building a future beyond the toxic failures of late-stage capitalism. Daring to imagine new social relations, new modes of economic existence, and new collective worlds, the authors provide skills and tools for perceiving—and living in— a post-capitalist future. Forerunners: Ideas FirstShort books of thought-in-process scholarship, where intense analysis, questioning, and speculation take the lead

UW Struggle provides an on-the-ground view of the smoldering attack on public higher education in Wisconsin. This is a chronicle of failed leadership and what actions, if any, can protect this vital American institution.