Your Search Results

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        December 2024

        Critical theory and Independent Living

        by Teodor Mladenov

        Critical theory and Independent Living explores intersections between contemporary critical theory and disabled people's struggle for self-determination. The book highlights the affinities between the Independent Living movement and studies of epistemic injustice, biopower, and psychopower. It discusses in depth the activists' critical engagement with welfare-state paternalism, neoliberal marketisation, and familialism. This helps develop a pioneering comparison between various welfare regimes grounded in Independent Living advocacy. The book draws on the activism of disabled people from the European Network on Independent Living (ENIL) by developing case studies of the ENIL's campaigning for deinstitutionalisation and personal assistance. It is argued that this work helps rethink independence as a form of interdependence, and that this reframing is pivotal for critical theorising in the twenty-first century.

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        September 2021

        Critical theory and demagogic populism

        by Paul K. Jones

        Populism is a powerful force today, but its full scope has eluded the analytical tools of both orthodox and heterodox 'populism studies'. This book provides a valuable alternative perspective. It reconstructs in detail for the first time the sociological analyses of US demagogues by members of the Frankfurt School and compares these with contemporary approaches. Modern demagogy emerges as a key under-researched feature of populism, since populist movements, whether 'left' or 'right', are highly susceptible to 'demagogic capture'. The book also details the culture industry's populist contradictions - including its role as an incubator of modern demagogues - from the 1930s through to today's social media and 'Trumpian psychotechnics'. Featuring a previously unpublished text by Adorno on modern demagogy as an appendix, it will be of interest to researchers and students in critical theory, sociology, politics, German studies, philosophy and history of ideas, as well as all those concerned about the rise of demagogic populism today.

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        June 2021

        Critical security in the Asia-Pacific

        by Anthony Burke, Matt McDonald

        In the wake of 9/11, the Asian crisis and the 2004 tsunami, traditional analytical frameworks are increasingly unable to explain how individuals and communities are rendered insecure, or advance individual, global or environmental security. In the Asia-Pacific, the accepted wisdom of realism has meant that analyses rarely move beyond the statist, militarist and exclusionary assumptions that underpin traditional realpolitik. This innovative new book challenges these limitations and addresses the missing problems, people and vulnerabilities of the Asia-Pacific region. It also turns a critical eye on traditional interstate strategic dynamics. Critical security in the Asia-Pacific applies both a critical theoretical approach that interrogates the deeper assumptions underpinning security discourses, and a human-centred policy approach that focuses on the security, welfare and emancipation of individuals and communities. Leading Asia-Pacific researchers combine to apply these frameworks to the most pressing issues in the region, from the Korean peninsula to environmental change, Indonesian conflict, the 'war on terror' and the plight of refugees. The result is a sophisticated and accessible account of often-neglected realities of marginalization in the region, and a compelling argument for the empowerment and security of the most vulnerable.

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        July 2021

        Critical theory and feeling

        The affective politics of the early Frankfurt School

        by Simon Mussell

        This book offers a unique and timely reading of the early Frankfurt School in response to the recent 'affective turn' within the arts and humanities. Resisting the overly rationalist tendencies of political philosophy, it argues that critical theory actively cultivates a powerful connection between thinking and feeling, and rediscovers a range of often neglected concepts that were of vital importance to the first generation of critical theorists, including melancholia, hope, (un)happiness, objects and mimesis. In doing so, it brings the dynamic work of Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, Ernst Bloch and Siegfried Kracauer into conversation with more recent debates around politics and affect. An important intervention in the fields of affect studies and social and political thought, Critical theory and feeling shows that sensuous experience is at the heart of the Frankfurt School's affective politics.

      • Trusted Partner
        Business, Economics & Law
        February 2025

        The political economy of Turkey’s integration to Europe

        Uneven development and hegemony

        by Elif Uzgören

        This book examines Turkey's integration with Europe within structural dynamics of globalisation from a critical political economy perspective. Critical approaches have been sidelined within European Studies. Turkish enlargement is not an exemption. The analyses are based on original data generated by 109 interviews conducted in 2010, 2017 and 2023 with five categories of actors: representatives of capital and labour, political parties, state officials, and struggles around ecology, patriarchy and migration. It argues that the pro-membership was hegemonic in the 2000s which was contested by two rival class strategies, Ha-vet and neo-mercantilism. In the 2010s, pro-membership is no longer hegemonic within rising critical tone of social forces supporting rival class strategies. Unevenness of Turkey's trajectory of integration to Europe is likely to be consolidated through market integration and management of migration through transactional approach.

      • Trusted Partner
        Literature & Literary Studies
        January 2024

        White before whiteness in the late Middle Ages

        by Wan-Chuan Kao

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        April 2022

        Critical theory and demagogic populism

        by Paul K. Jones, Darrow Schecter

        Populism is a powerful force today, but its full scope has eluded the analytical tools of both orthodox and heterodox 'populism studies'. This book provides a valuable alternative perspective. It reconstructs in detail for the first time the sociological analyses of US demagogues by members of the Frankfurt School and compares these with contemporary approaches. Modern demagogy emerges as a key under-researched feature of populism, since populist movements, whether 'left' or 'right', are highly susceptible to 'demagogic capture'. The book also details the culture industry's populist contradictions - including its role as an incubator of modern demagogues - from the 1930s through to today's social media and 'Trumpian psychotechnics'. Featuring a previously unpublished text by Adorno on modern demagogy as an appendix, it will be of interest to everyone concerned about the rise of demagogic populism today.

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        February 2001

        Women, scholarship and criticism c.1790–1900

        Gender and knowledge

        by Joan Bellamy, Anne Laurence, Gill Perry, Susan Williams

        Brings together the varied artistic, critical and cultural productions by women scholars, critics and artists between 1790-1900, many of whom are little known in the canonical histories of the period. Questions the concepts of 'scholarship', 'criticism' and 'artist' across the different disciplines. Women discussed include authors (Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Sydney Morgan and Anna Jameson) actresses ( Elizabeth Siddons, Dorothy Jordan, and Mary Robinson) critics ( Margaret Oliphant and Mary Cowden Clarke) historians (Agnes Strickland, Lucy Aikin, Mary Anne Everett Green, Elizabeth Cooper and Lucy Toulmin Smith) as well as the writers and readers of Women's magazines, educationalists and translators. Makes a significant and original contribution to the development of gender studies by extending the frontiers of existing knowledge and research. ;

      • Trusted Partner
      • Trusted Partner
        The Arts
        January 2021

        Critical design in Japan

        Material culture, luxury, and the avant-garde

        by Ory Bartal

        This book tells the story of critical avant-garde design in Japan, which emerged during the 1960s and continues to inspire designers today. The practice communicates a form of visual and material protest drawing on the ideologies and critical theories of the 1960s and 1970s, notably feminism, body politics, the politics of identity, and ecological, anti-consumerist and anti-institutional critiques, as well as the concept of otherness. It also presents an encounter between two seemingly contradictory concepts: luxury and the avant-garde. The book challenges the definition of design as the production of unnecessary decorative and conceptual objects, and the characterisation of Japanese design in particular as beautiful, sublime or a product of 'Japanese culture'. In doing so it reveals the ways in which material and visual culture serve to voice protest and formulate a social critique.

      • Trusted Partner
        The Arts
        February 2025

        Tattoos in crime and detective narratives

        Marking and remarking

        by Kate Watson, Katharine Cox

        Tattoos in crime and detective narratives examines representations of the tattoo and tattooing in literature, television and film, from two periods of tattoo renaissance (1851-1914, and c1955 to present). It makes an original contribution to understandings of crime and detective genre and the ways in which tattoos act as a mimetic device that marks and remarks these narratives in complex ways. With a focus on tattooing as a bodily narrative, the book incorporates the critical perspectives of posthumanism, spatiality, postcolonialism, embodiment and gender studies. The grouped essays examine the first tattoo renaissance, the rebirth of the tattoo in contemporary culture through literature, children's literature, film and television. The collection has a broad appeal, and will be of interest to all literature and media scholars, but in particular those with an interest in crime and detective narratives and skin studies.

      • Trusted Partner
        Philosophy: epistemology & theory of knowledge
        June 2017

        Critical theory and epistemology

        The politics of modern thought and science

        by Anastasia Marinopoulou. Series edited by Darrow Schecter

        This volume in the Critical Theory and Contemporary Society series explores the arguments between critical theory and epistemology in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Focusing on the first and second generations of critical theorists and Luhmann's systems theory, the book examines how each approaches epistemology. It opens by looking at twentieth-century epistemology, particularly the concept of lifeworld (Lebenswelt). It then moves on to discuss structuralism, poststructuralism, critical realism, the epistemological problematics of Foucault's writings and the dialectics of systems theory. This unique work takes a comparative look at structuralism and post-structuralism's epistemological theory with special reference to scientific reason. It also investigates Luhmann's works in epistemology. The aim is to explore whether the focal point for epistemology and the sciences remain that social and political interests actually form a concrete point of concern for the sciences as well.

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        August 2020

        Encountering extremism

        by Alice Martini, Kieran Ford, Richard Jackson

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        June 2021

        Critical theory and sociological theory

        by Darrow Schecter

      • Trusted Partner
        The Arts
        May 2021

        Development, architecture, and the formation of heritage in late twentieth-century Iran

        A vital past

        by Ali Mozaffari, Nigel Westbrook

        This book analyses the use of the past and the production of heritage through architectural design in the developmental context of Iran, a country that has endured radical cultural and political shifts in the past five decades. Offering a trans-disciplinary approach toward complex relationship between architecture, development, and heritage, Mozaffari and Westbrook suggest that transformations in developmental contexts like Iran must be seen in relation to global political and historical exchanges, as well as the specificities of localities. The premise of the book is that development has been a globalizing project that originated in the West. Transposed into other contexts, this project instigates a renewed historical consciousness and imagination of the past. The authors explore the rise of this consciousness in architecture, examining the theoretical context to the debates, international exchanges made in architectural congresses in the 1970s, the use of housing as the vehicle for everyday heritage, and forms of symbolic public architecture that reflect monumental time.

      • Trusted Partner
      • Trusted Partner
      • Trusted Partner
        The Arts
        March 2021

        Queer exceptions

        Solo performance in neoliberal times

        by Stephen Greer

        Queer exceptions is a study of contemporary solo performance in the UK and Western Europe that explores the contentious relationship between identity, individuality and neoliberalism. With diverse case studies featuring the work of La Ribot, David Hoyle, Oreet Ashery, Bridget Christie, Tanja Ostojic, Adrian Howells and Nassim Soleimanpour, the book examines the role of singular or 'exceptional' subjects in constructing and challenging assumed notions of communal sociability and togetherness, while drawing fresh insight from the fields of sociology, gender studies and political philosophy to reconsider theatre's attachment to singular lives and experiences. Framed by a detailed exploration of arts festivals as encapsulating the material, entrepreneurial circumstances of contemporary performance-making, this is the first major critical study of solo work since the millennium.

      Subscribe to our

      newsletter