Böcker i Forerunners: Ideas First-serien

The stock market is the background of how we begin to deal with the complex imbrication of humans, machines, and noise

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.

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

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.

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).

Uncovering a vast maze of realities in the media theories of Marshall McLuhan The term "global village"-coined in the 1960s by Marshall McLuhan-has persisted into the twenty-first century as a key trope of techno-humanitarian discourse, casting economic and technical transformations in a utopian light. Against that tendency, this book excavates

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.

Making sense of public identities, online and offline

Excavates a theory of cinema in Derrida's writing on love, narcissism, echopoiesis, and fluidity

Inspired by one of Nelson Mandela's recurring nightmares, Mandela's Dark Years offers a political reading of dream-life

Rethinking the philosophical and anthropological basis of our ontology

The evolution and meaning of our love affair with Apple and its devices

Toward a theory of the city at the crossroads of aesthetics and politics

What can we learn about culture from other species?

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

Could there be a bigger paradox than the black man using Martin Heidegger to repel the white woman's racism?

Examines the material spaces in which our networks entangle themselves

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

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

Reckoning the unsettled relationship between aesthetics and politics

Critiques the environmental destruction caused by media technologies in the anthropocene era