front cover of Critical Historical Studies, volume 9 number 1 (Spring 2022)
Critical Historical Studies, volume 9 number 1 (Spring 2022)
The University of Chicago Press
University of Chicago Press Journals, 2022
This is volume 9 issue 1 of Critical Historical Studies. Critical Historical Studies is an interdisciplinary journal devoted to historical reflections on politics, culture, economy, and social life. CHS features research on the implications of socio-economic transformations for cultural, political, and social change. In the broad tradition of Critical Theory, CHS will explore the complex connections between cultural form and socio-economic context and promote a reflexive awareness of the researcher’s own position in the history of global capitalist society. The journal aims to foster interdisciplinary exchange among scholars across the entire range of the social sciences and humanities, and publishes work on all historical eras and regions of the world.
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front cover of Critical Historical Studies, volume 9 number 2 (Fall 2022)
Critical Historical Studies, volume 9 number 2 (Fall 2022)
The University of Chicago Press
University of Chicago Press Journals, 2022
This is volume 9 issue 2 of Critical Historical Studies. Critical Historical Studies is an interdisciplinary journal devoted to historical reflections on politics, culture, economy, and social life. CHS features research on the implications of socio-economic transformations for cultural, political, and social change. In the broad tradition of Critical Theory, CHS will explore the complex connections between cultural form and socio-economic context and promote a reflexive awareness of the researcher’s own position in the history of global capitalist society. The journal aims to foster interdisciplinary exchange among scholars across the entire range of the social sciences and humanities, and publishes work on all historical eras and regions of the world.
[more]

front cover of A Critical History of Poverty Finance
A Critical History of Poverty Finance
Colonial Roots and Neoliberal Failures
Nick
Pluto Press, 2022

A comprehensive historical tracing of how the contemporary finance-poverty-development nexus emerged.

'The definitive account of the history of poverty finance' - Susanne Soederberg

Finance, mobile, and digital technologies - or 'fintech' - are being heralded in the world of development by the likes of the IMF and World Bank as a silver bullet in the fight against poverty. But should we believe the hype?

A Critical History of Poverty Finance demonstrates how newfangled 'digital financial inclusion' efforts suffer from the same essential flaws as earlier iterations of neoliberal 'financial inclusion.' Relying on artificially created markets that simply aren't there among the world's most disadvantaged economic actors, they also reinforce existing patterns of inequality and uneven development, many of which date back to the colonial era.

Bernards offers an astute analysis of the current fintech fad, contextualized through a detailed colonial history of development finance, that ultimately reveals the neoliberal vision of poverty alleviation for the pipe dream it is.

[more]

front cover of A Critical History of the New American Studies, 1970–1990
A Critical History of the New American Studies, 1970–1990
Günter H. Lenz
Dartmouth College Press, 2016
Starting in 2005, Günter H. Lenz began preparing a book-length exploration of the transformation of the field of American Studies in the crucial years between 1970 and 1990. As a commentator on, contributor to, and participant in the intellectual and institutional changes in his field, Lenz was well situated to offer a comprehensive and balanced interpretation of that seminal era. Building on essays he wrote while these changes were ongoing, he shows how the revolution in theory, the emergence of postmodern socioeconomic conditions, the increasing globalization of everyday life, and postcolonial responses to continuing and new forms of colonial domination had transformed American Studies as a discipline focused on the distinctive qualities of the United States to a field encompassing the many different “Americas” in the Western Hemisphere as well as how this complex region influenced and was interpreted by the rest of the world. In tracking the shift of American Studies from its exceptionalist bias to its unmanageable global responsibilities, Lenz shows the crucial roles played by the 1930s’ Left in the U.S., the Frankfurt School in Germany and elsewhere between 1930 and 1960, Continental post-structuralism, neo-Marxism, and post-colonialism. Lenz’s friends and colleagues, now his editors, present here his final backward glance at a critical period in American Studies and the birth of the Transnational.
[more]

front cover of Critical Hours
Critical Hours
Search and Rescue in the White Mountains
Sandy Stott
University Press of New England, 2018
A misread map, a sudden storm, a forgotten headlamp—and suddenly a leisurely hike turns into a treacherous endeavor. In the past decade, inexpensive but sophisticated navigation devices and mobile phones have led to alarming levels of overconfidence on the trail. Adding to this worrisome trend, the increasing popularity of ventures into mountainous terrain has led hikers seeking solitude—or an adrenaline rush—into increasingly remote or risky forays. Sandy Stott, the “Accidents” editor at the journal of the Appalachian Mountain Club, delivers both a history and a celebration of the search and rescue workers who save countless lives in the White Mountains—along with a plea for us not to take their steadfastness and bravery for granted. Filled with tales of astonishing courage and sobering tragedy, Critical Hours will appeal to outdoor enthusiasts and armchair adventurers alike.
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Critical Indigenous Studies
Engagements in First World Locations
Edited by Aileen Moreton-Robinson
University of Arizona Press, 2016
With increasing speed, the emerging discipline of critical Indigenous studies is expanding and demarcating its territory from Indigenous studies through the work of a new generation of Indigenous scholars. Critical Indigenous Studies makes an important contribution to this expansion, disrupting the certainty of disciplinary knowledge produced in the twentieth century, when studying Indigenous peoples was primarily the domain of non-Indigenous scholars.
 
Aileen Moreton-Robinson’s introductory essay provides a context for the emerging discipline. The volume is organized into three sections: the first includes essays that interrogate the embedded nature of Indigenous studies within academic institutions; the second explores the epistemology of the discipline; and the third section is devoted to understanding the locales of critical inquiry and practice.
 
Each essay places and contemplates critical Indigenous studies within the context of First World nations, which continue to occupy Indigenous lands in the twenty-first century. The contributors include Aboriginal, Metis, Maori, Kanaka Maoli, Filipino-Pohnpeian, and Native American scholars working and writing through a shared legacy born of British and later U.S. imperialism. In these countries, critical Indigenous studies is flourishing and transitioning into a discipline, a knowledge/power domain where distinct work is produced, taught, researched, and disseminated by Indigenous scholars.

View the Table of Contents
here.

Contributors:

Hokulani K. Aikau
Chris Andersen
Larissa Behrendt
Vicente M. Diaz
Noelani Goodyear Kaopua
Daniel Heath Justice
Brendan Hokowhitu
Aileen Moreton-Robinson
Jean M. O'Brien
Noenoe Silva
Kim Tallbear
Robert Warrior       
[more]

front cover of Critical Inquiry, volume 47 number 3 (Spring 2021)
Critical Inquiry, volume 47 number 3 (Spring 2021)
The University of Chicago Press
University of Chicago Press Journals, 2021

logo for University of Chicago Press Journals
Critical Inquiry, volume 47 number 4 (Summer 2021)
The University of Chicago Press
University of Chicago Press Journals, 2021

front cover of Critical Inquiry, volume 48 number 1 (Autumn 2021)
Critical Inquiry, volume 48 number 1 (Autumn 2021)
The University of Chicago Press
University of Chicago Press Journals, 2021
This is volume 48 issue 1 of Critical Inquiry. Critical Inquiry is a peer-reviewed interdisciplinary journal devoted to the best critical thought in the arts and humanities. Combining a commitment to rigorous scholarship with a vital concern for dialogue and debate, the journal presents articles by eminent and emerging scholars, critics, and artists on a wide variety of issues in contemporary criticism and culture. Associated with no single school of thought, tied to no single discipline, Critical Inquiry is dedicated to providing a forum for cutting-edge thought while reconsidering traditional concepts and practices.
[more]

front cover of Critical Inquiry, volume 48 number 2 (Winter 2022)
Critical Inquiry, volume 48 number 2 (Winter 2022)
The University of Chicago Press
University of Chicago Press Journals, 2022
This is volume 48 issue 2 of Critical Inquiry. Critical Inquiry is a peer-reviewed interdisciplinary journal devoted to the best critical thought in the arts and humanities. Combining a commitment to rigorous scholarship with a vital concern for dialogue and debate, the journal presents articles by eminent and emerging scholars, critics, and artists on a wide variety of issues in contemporary criticism and culture. Associated with no single school of thought, tied to no single discipline, Critical Inquiry is dedicated to providing a forum for cutting-edge thought while reconsidering traditional concepts and practices.
[more]

front cover of Critical Inquiry, volume 48 number 3 (Spring 2022)
Critical Inquiry, volume 48 number 3 (Spring 2022)
The University of Chicago Press
University of Chicago Press Journals, 2022
This is volume 48 issue 3 of Critical Inquiry. Critical Inquiry is a peer-reviewed interdisciplinary journal devoted to the best critical thought in the arts and humanities. Combining a commitment to rigorous scholarship with a vital concern for dialogue and debate, the journal presents articles by eminent and emerging scholars, critics, and artists on a wide variety of issues in contemporary criticism and culture. Associated with no single school of thought, tied to no single discipline, Critical Inquiry is dedicated to providing a forum for cutting-edge thought while reconsidering traditional concepts and practices.
[more]

front cover of Critical Inquiry, volume 48 number 4 (Summer 2022)
Critical Inquiry, volume 48 number 4 (Summer 2022)
The University of Chicago Press
University of Chicago Press Journals, 2022
This is volume 48 issue 4 of Critical Inquiry. Critical Inquiry is a peer-reviewed interdisciplinary journal devoted to the best critical thought in the arts and humanities. Combining a commitment to rigorous scholarship with a vital concern for dialogue and debate, the journal presents articles by eminent and emerging scholars, critics, and artists on a wide variety of issues in contemporary criticism and culture. Associated with no single school of thought, tied to no single discipline, Critical Inquiry is dedicated to providing a forum for cutting-edge thought while reconsidering traditional concepts and practices.
[more]

front cover of Critical Inquiry, volume 49 number 1 (Autumn 2022)
Critical Inquiry, volume 49 number 1 (Autumn 2022)
The University of Chicago Press
University of Chicago Press Journals, 2022
This is volume 49 issue 1 of Critical Inquiry. Critical Inquiry is a peer-reviewed interdisciplinary journal devoted to the best critical thought in the arts and humanities. Combining a commitment to rigorous scholarship with a vital concern for dialogue and debate, the journal presents articles by eminent and emerging scholars, critics, and artists on a wide variety of issues in contemporary criticism and culture. Associated with no single school of thought, tied to no single discipline, Critical Inquiry is dedicated to providing a forum for cutting-edge thought while reconsidering traditional concepts and practices.
[more]

front cover of Critical Inquiry, volume 49 number 2 (Winter 2023)
Critical Inquiry, volume 49 number 2 (Winter 2023)
The University of Chicago Press
University of Chicago Press Journals, 2023
This is volume 49 issue 2 of Critical Inquiry. Critical Inquiry is a peer-reviewed interdisciplinary journal devoted to the best critical thought in the arts and humanities. Combining a commitment to rigorous scholarship with a vital concern for dialogue and debate, the journal presents articles by eminent and emerging scholars, critics, and artists on a wide variety of issues in contemporary criticism and culture. Associated with no single school of thought, tied to no single discipline, Critical Inquiry is dedicated to providing a forum for cutting-edge thought while reconsidering traditional concepts and practices.
[more]

front cover of Critical Inquiry, volume 49 number 3 (Spring 2023)
Critical Inquiry, volume 49 number 3 (Spring 2023)
The University of Chicago Press
University of Chicago Press Journals, 2023
This is volume 49 issue 3 of Critical Inquiry. Critical Inquiry is a peer-reviewed interdisciplinary journal devoted to the best critical thought in the arts and humanities. Combining a commitment to rigorous scholarship with a vital concern for dialogue and debate, the journal presents articles by eminent and emerging scholars, critics, and artists on a wide variety of issues in contemporary criticism and culture. Associated with no single school of thought, tied to no single discipline, Critical Inquiry is dedicated to providing a forum for cutting-edge thought while reconsidering traditional concepts and practices.
[more]

front cover of Critical Inquiry, volume 49 number 4 (Summer 2023)
Critical Inquiry, volume 49 number 4 (Summer 2023)
The University of Chicago Press
University of Chicago Press Journals, 2023
This is volume 49 issue 4 of Critical Inquiry. Critical Inquiry is a peer-reviewed interdisciplinary journal devoted to the best critical thought in the arts and humanities. Combining a commitment to rigorous scholarship with a vital concern for dialogue and debate, the journal presents articles by eminent and emerging scholars, critics, and artists on a wide variety of issues in contemporary criticism and culture. Associated with no single school of thought, tied to no single discipline, Critical Inquiry is dedicated to providing a forum for cutting-edge thought while reconsidering traditional concepts and practices.
[more]

front cover of Critical Inquiry, volume 50 number 1 (Autumn 2023)
Critical Inquiry, volume 50 number 1 (Autumn 2023)
The University of Chicago Press
University of Chicago Press Journals, 2023
This is volume 50 issue 1 of Critical Inquiry. Critical Inquiry is a peer-reviewed interdisciplinary journal devoted to the best critical thought in the arts and humanities. Combining a commitment to rigorous scholarship with a vital concern for dialogue and debate, the journal presents articles by eminent and emerging scholars, critics, and artists on a wide variety of issues in contemporary criticism and culture. Associated with no single school of thought, tied to no single discipline, Critical Inquiry is dedicated to providing a forum for cutting-edge thought while reconsidering traditional concepts and practices.
[more]

front cover of Critical Inquiry, volume 50 number 2 (Winter 2024)
Critical Inquiry, volume 50 number 2 (Winter 2024)
The University of Chicago Press
University of Chicago Press Journals, 2024
This is volume 50 issue 2 of Critical Inquiry. Critical Inquiry is a peer-reviewed interdisciplinary journal devoted to the best critical thought in the arts and humanities. Combining a commitment to rigorous scholarship with a vital concern for dialogue and debate, the journal presents articles by eminent and emerging scholars, critics, and artists on a wide variety of issues in contemporary criticism and culture. Associated with no single school of thought, tied to no single discipline, Critical Inquiry is dedicated to providing a forum for cutting-edge thought while reconsidering traditional concepts and practices.
[more]

front cover of Critical Inquiry, volume 50 number 3 (Spring 2024)
Critical Inquiry, volume 50 number 3 (Spring 2024)
The University of Chicago Press
University of Chicago Press Journals, 2024
This is volume 50 issue 3 of Critical Inquiry. Critical Inquiry is a peer-reviewed interdisciplinary journal devoted to the best critical thought in the arts and humanities. Combining a commitment to rigorous scholarship with a vital concern for dialogue and debate, the journal presents articles by eminent and emerging scholars, critics, and artists on a wide variety of issues in contemporary criticism and culture. Associated with no single school of thought, tied to no single discipline, Critical Inquiry is dedicated to providing a forum for cutting-edge thought while reconsidering traditional concepts and practices.
[more]

front cover of Critical Inquiry, volume 50 number 4 (Summer 2024)
Critical Inquiry, volume 50 number 4 (Summer 2024)
The University of Chicago Press
University of Chicago Press Journals, 2024
This is volume 50 issue 4 of Critical Inquiry. Critical Inquiry is a peer-reviewed interdisciplinary journal devoted to the best critical thought in the arts and humanities. Combining a commitment to rigorous scholarship with a vital concern for dialogue and debate, the journal presents articles by eminent and emerging scholars, critics, and artists on a wide variety of issues in contemporary criticism and culture. Associated with no single school of thought, tied to no single discipline, Critical Inquiry is dedicated to providing a forum for cutting-edge thought while reconsidering traditional concepts and practices.
[more]

front cover of Critical Inquiry, volume 51 number 1 (Autumn 2024)
Critical Inquiry, volume 51 number 1 (Autumn 2024)
The University of Chicago Press
University of Chicago Press Journals, 2024
This is volume 51 issue 1 of Critical Inquiry. Critical Inquiry is a peer-reviewed interdisciplinary journal devoted to the best critical thought in the arts and humanities. Combining a commitment to rigorous scholarship with a vital concern for dialogue and debate, the journal presents articles by eminent and emerging scholars, critics, and artists on a wide variety of issues in contemporary criticism and culture. Associated with no single school of thought, tied to no single discipline, Critical Inquiry is dedicated to providing a forum for cutting-edge thought while reconsidering traditional concepts and practices.
[more]

front cover of Critical Inquiry, volume 51 number 2 (Winter 2025)
Critical Inquiry, volume 51 number 2 (Winter 2025)
The University of Chicago Press
University of Chicago Press Journals, 2025
This is volume 51 issue 2 of Critical Inquiry. Critical Inquiry is a peer-reviewed interdisciplinary journal devoted to the best critical thought in the arts and humanities. Combining a commitment to rigorous scholarship with a vital concern for dialogue and debate, the journal presents articles by eminent and emerging scholars, critics, and artists on a wide variety of issues in contemporary criticism and culture. Associated with no single school of thought, tied to no single discipline, Critical Inquiry is dedicated to providing a forum for cutting-edge thought while reconsidering traditional concepts and practices.
[more]

front cover of Critical Inquiry, volume 51 number 3 (Spring 2025)
Critical Inquiry, volume 51 number 3 (Spring 2025)
The University of Chicago Press
University of Chicago Press Journals, 2025
This is volume 51 issue 3 of Critical Inquiry. Critical Inquiry is a peer-reviewed interdisciplinary journal devoted to the best critical thought in the arts and humanities. Combining a commitment to rigorous scholarship with a vital concern for dialogue and debate, the journal presents articles by eminent and emerging scholars, critics, and artists on a wide variety of issues in contemporary criticism and culture. Associated with no single school of thought, tied to no single discipline, Critical Inquiry is dedicated to providing a forum for cutting-edge thought while reconsidering traditional concepts and practices.
[more]

front cover of Critical Inquiry, volume 51 number 4 (Summer 2025)
Critical Inquiry, volume 51 number 4 (Summer 2025)
The University of Chicago Press
University of Chicago Press Journals, 2025
This is volume 51 issue 4 of Critical Inquiry. Critical Inquiry is a peer-reviewed interdisciplinary journal devoted to the best critical thought in the arts and humanities. Combining a commitment to rigorous scholarship with a vital concern for dialogue and debate, the journal presents articles by eminent and emerging scholars, critics, and artists on a wide variety of issues in contemporary criticism and culture. Associated with no single school of thought, tied to no single discipline, Critical Inquiry is dedicated to providing a forum for cutting-edge thought while reconsidering traditional concepts and practices.
[more]

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Critical Issues in Healthcare Policy and Politics in the Gulf Cooperation Council States
Ravinder Mamtani, MD and Albert B. Lowenfels, MD, Editors
Georgetown University Press

This is the first book to examine challenges in the healthcare sector in the six Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries (Saudi Arabia, Oman, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Kuwait, and Bahrain). These countries experienced remarkably swift transformations from small fishing and pearling communities at the beginning of the twentieth century to wealthy petro-states today. Their healthcare systems, however, are only now beginning to catch up.

Rapid changes to the population and lifestyles of the GCC states have completely changed—and challenged—the region’s health profile and infrastructure. While major successes in combatting infectious diseases and improving standards of primary healthcare are reflected in key health indicators, new trends have developed; increasingly “lifestyle” or “wealthy country” diseases, such as diabetes, heart disease, and cancer, have replaced the old maladies. To meet these emerging healthcare needs, GCC states require highly trained and skilled healthcare workers, an environment that supports local training, state-of-the-art diagnostic laboratories and hospitals, research production and dissemination, and knowledge acquisition. They face shortages in most if not all of these areas. This book provides a comprehensive study of the rapidly changing health profile of the region, the existing conditions of healthcare systems, and the challenges posed to healthcare management across the six states of the GCC.

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front cover of Critical Latin American And Latino Studies
Critical Latin American And Latino Studies
Juan Poblete
University of Minnesota Press, 2003

Situates these dynamic disciplines within debates around globalization

This book brings together some of the most prominent scholars working across the spectrum of Latin American and Latino studies to explore their changing intellectual undertaking in relation to global processes of change. Critical Latin American and Latino Studies identifies the challenges and possibilities of more politically engaged and theoretically critical modes of scholarly practice.

One objective is to provide a brief critical history of the study of various Latin American cultures—Latino, Chicano, Puerto Rican, among others. But these essays also serve to assess the roles of ethnic and area studies in light of changing scholarly trends, from emphases on gender and sexuality to a focus on postcoloniality and globalization. The result is an important contribution to current debates on the conditions of contemporary knowledge production. Contributors: Tomás Almaguer, San Francisco State U; Frances R. Aparicio, U of Illinois, Chicago; John Beverley, U of Pittsburgh; Angie Chabram-Dernersesian, U of California, Davis; Román de la Campa, SUNY, Stony Brook; Juan Flores, Hunter College and CUNY; Walter D. Mignolo, Duke U; Giorgio Perissinotto, U of California, Santa Barbara; Kirsten Silva Gruesz, U of California, Santa Cruz; Stefano Varese, U of California, Davis; George Yúdice, NYU; Juan Zevallos Aguilar, Villanova U.
[more]

front cover of The Critical Legal Studies Movement
The Critical Legal Studies Movement
Roberto Mangabeira Unger
Harvard University Press, 1986

front cover of The Critical Librarianship and Pedagogy Symposium
The Critical Librarianship and Pedagogy Symposium
Reflections, Revisions, and New Works
Yvonne Mery
Assoc of College & Research Libraries, 2023
Academic librarianship is due for a major paradigm shift in response to the existential threats facing the library profession and higher education, and library workers are leading this shift with new ideas about community, feminism, education, and social change.
 
The Critical Librarianship and Pedagogy Symposium: Reflections, Revisions, and New Works collects expanded and updated presentations given at the Critical Librarianship and Pedagogy Symposium (CLAPS) held biennially at the University of Arizona Libraries. This anthology provides a toolkit for critical library pedagogy that recognizes how knowledge is created within historical and deeply politicized contexts. Authors working in library or disciplinary teaching fields explore intersections between information literacy and critical pedagogy and provide current thinking, assessment, and reflection on their practices of teaching students how to recognize and critique the oppressive power structures inherent in educational systems. The work done by librarians is analyzed to reveal the socioeconomic frameworks that drive the costs of our labor.
 
Divided into five parts—Critical Pedagogies in the Classroom, Feminist Library Practices, The Labor of Librarianship, Practices of Care, and Community Archives—chapters include explorations of the advent of neoliberalism in higher education, social justice, white fragility, supporting neurodivergence in education, and disability-rights activism. They use lenses such as queer, intersectional, feminist, and critical race theory to examine subjects, and include practices for sustainable teaching, facilitating dialogue in the classroom, and using tools such as user experience or empathic design. The Critical Librarianship and Pedagogy Symposium offers ways to incorporate critical pedagogy theory into your own practices as educators, both within the library and in higher education in general.
 
[more]

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Critical Library Leadership
Managing Self and Others in Today's Academic Library
Kristin Henrich
Assoc of College & Research Libraries, 2024
Many of us arrive in supervisory positions with little or no formal training in academic library leadership. We attempt to teach ourselves the skills we need to be good managers and organizational leaders while juggling our own identity shifts and insecurities.
 
Critical Library Leadership: Managing Self and Others in Today’s Academic Library provides practical, library-specific, hands-on tools that help us shape our approach to leadership and ourselves as leaders. It gives practical strategies for dealing with stress and addressing feelings of insecurity alongside managing the organization from an equity perspective that places people at the forefront. Each section offers a mixture of theory and research, lived experience, and practice that captures many different techniques you can apply to your own journey and organizational context in both formal and informal ways.
 
Part I: Leader as Self
            Section I: Care, Empathy, and Authenticity
            Section II: Career Development
 
Part II: Leader as Role
            Section III: Relationships with Others
            Section IV: Management Practices
 
Critical Library Leadership offers a sense of recognition and of community, new ideas for personal and organizational practice, and a renewed appreciation for the immense amount of affective, emotional, and practical labor that is required of each of us as leaders.
[more]

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Critical Library Pedagogy Handbook Volume One
Essays and Workbooks Activities
Nicole Pagowsky
Assoc of College & Research Libraries, 2016

logo for Assoc of College & Research Libraries
Critical Library Pedagogy Handbook Volume Two
Lesson Plans
Nicole Pagowsky
Assoc of College & Research Libraries, 2016

front cover of The Critical Limits of Embodiment
The Critical Limits of Embodiment
Reflections on Disability Criticism, Volume 13
Carol A. Breckenridge and Candace Vogler, eds.
Duke University Press
Disability studies, a new field of inquiry in the human sciences, has the potential to unsettle many basic assumptions about the body, citizenship, capital, and beauty. This special issue of Public Culture explores disability criticism, an emergent subfield within disability studies.
The articles in this collection build on recent work in the larger arena of disability studies and address such subjects as the hegemony of the concept of normalcy, the idea of the able body, and the constitutive place of disability in ethics, liberalism, and capitalism. The Critical Limits of Embodiment examines the commonsense foundations of disability studies, which tend to universalize Western norms and assumptions in which the normal is foregrounded and the able body forms the basis for the universal liberal subject. The broad geographic scope of these essays constitutes one of their greatest contributions to the field. In order to query the body-related universalisms of Western thought, the issue seeks to be self-conscious about cultural locations.
The volume examines the figure of the disabled in the cultural imaginaries of a variety of historical, cultural, and disciplinary contexts including literature, anthropology, philosophy, and art history.

Contributors. Renu Addlakha, Carol A. Breckenridge, Veena Das, Faye Ginsburg, Wu Hung, Eva Kittay, Celeste Langan, David Mitchell, Rayna Rapp, Susan Schweik, Sharon Snyder, Candace Vogler, Hank Vogler

[more]

front cover of Critical Making in the Age of AI
Critical Making in the Age of AI
Emily Johnson and Anastasia Salter
Amherst College Press, 2025
Critical Making in the Age of AI invites students, teachers, learners, and digital humanists to explore making as scholarship. Inspired by the craft traditions of textile arts, this book combines a survey of forms of alternative scholarly communication—such as comics, GIFs, maps, games, and generative AI—and a pattern book, where patterns serve as starting points that makers can reimagine and remix. Firmly grounded in the humanities and utilizing free tools and platforms (including Twine, Voyant, and Tracery) wherever possible, this engaging and accessible guide to digital methods introduces and puts into practice concepts that are essential to preparing students to navigate a changing landscape of media and information without investing in proprietary software, dedicated lab space, or expensive creative tools.

The book’s eight patterns are especially appropriate for those just beginning to explore digital scholarly methods, and one goal of Critical Making in the Age of AI is to provide structure for work that is both meaningful and achievable with limited resources and time. By centering critical making through a design-justice and feminist lens, the coauthors model how inclusive and expansive approaches to making in research and teaching are vital to shaping the humanities of the future.

[more]

front cover of Critical Medical Anthropology
Critical Medical Anthropology
Perspectives in and from Latin America
Edited by Jennie Gamlin, Sahra Gibbon, Paola Sesia, and Lina Berrío
University College London, 2020
Critical Medical Anthropology presents inspiring new work from scholars engaged with and carrying out ethnographic research in or from Latin America, addressing themes of central importance to contemporary perspectives on Critical Medical Anthropology (CMA). This includes issues of health inequalities, embodiment of history, indigenous health, non-communicable diseases, social justice, gendered violence, migration, substance abuse, reproductive politics and the judicialisation of health. It includes work spanning four countries in Latin America (Mexico, Brazil, Guatemala and Peru) as well as the trans-migratory contexts they connect and are defined by. By drawing on diverse social practices it addresses themes of central relevance to medical anthropology and global health, including reproduction and maternal health, sex work, rare and chronic disease and the use of pharmaceuticals and incorporating questions of agency, identity, reproductive politics, indigenous health, and human rights.
 
[more]

front cover of Critical Moves
Critical Moves
Dance Studies in Theory and Politics
Randy Martin
Duke University Press, 1998
In Critical Moves Randy Martin sets in motion an inquiry into the relationship between dance, politics, and cultural theory. Drawing on his own experiences as a dancer as well as his observations as a cultural critic and social theorist, Martin illustrates how the study and practice of dance can reanimate arrested prospects for progressive politics and social change.
From experimental and concert dance to more popular expressions, Martin engages a range of performances and demonstrates how a critical reflection on dance helps promote fluency in the language of mobilization that political theory alludes to yet rarely speaks. He explores how Bill T. Jones’s Last Supper at Uncle Tom’s Cabin/The Promised Land defies attempts to separate social ideas from aesthetic concerns and celebrates multiculturalism in the face of a singular national culture; he studies the choreography in rapper Ice Cube’s video “Wicked,” which confronts racialized depictions of violent crime; and he discusses how racial difference is negotiated by analyzing a hip hop aerobics class in a nonblack environment.
Revealing how mastery of modern dance technique teaches an individual body to express cultural difference and display its intrinsic diversity, Critical Moves concludes with a reflection on the contribution dance studies can make to other fields within cultural studies and social sciences. As such it becomes an occasion to rethink the terms of history and agency, multiculturalism and nationalism, identity and political economy. This book will appeal not only to scholars and practitioners of dance, but also to a wide cross-section of people concerned with the study of political theory and the history of social movements.


[more]

front cover of Critical Norths
Critical Norths
Space, Nature, Theory
Edited by Sarah J. Ray and Kevin Maier
University of Alaska Press, 2017
For millennia, “the North” has held a powerful sway in Western culture. Long seen through contradictions—empty of life yet full of promise, populated by indigenous communities yet ripe for conquest, pristine yet marked by a long human history—it has moved to the foreground of contemporary life as the most dramatic stage for the reality of climate change.
 
This book brings together scholars from a range of disciplines to ask key questions about the North and how we’ve conceived it—and how conceiving of it in those terms has caused us to fail the region’s human and nonhuman life. Engaging questions of space, place, indigeneity, identity, nature, the environment, justice, narrative, history, and more, it offers a crucial starting point for an essential rethinking of both the idea and the reality of the North.
[more]

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Critical Passions
Selected Essays
Jean Franco
Duke University Press, 1999
Jean Franco’s work as a pathbreaking theorist, cultural critic, and scholar has helped to define Latin American studies over the last three decades. In the process, Franco has played a crucial role in developing cultural studies in both the English- and Spanish-speaking worlds. Critical Passions is the first volume to gather a wide-ranging selection of Franco’s influential essays.
A key participant in the major debates in Latin American studies—beginning with the “boom” period of the 1960s and continuing through debates on ideology and discourse, Marxism, mass culture, and postmodernism—Franco is recognized for her feminist critique of Latin American writing. While her principal books are all readily available, Franco’s several dozen articles are dispersed in a variety of periodicals in Latin America, Europe, and the United States. Although many of these essays are considered pioneering and classic, they have never before been collected in a single work. In this volume, Mary Louise Pratt and Kathleen Newman have organized the essays into four interrelated sections: feminism and the critique of authoritarianism, mass and popular culture, Latin American literature from the “boom” onward, and the cultural history of Mexico. As a group, these writings demonstrate Franco’s ability to reflect on and judge with equal seriousness all spheres of expression, whether subway graffiti, a fashion manual, or an avant-garde haiku. A bona fide fan of popular and mass media, Franco never allows her critiques to dissolve into the puritanical or reductive; instead, she finds ways to present and debate complex theoretical questions in direct and accessible language.
This volume will draw an extensive readership in Latin American, cultural, and women’s studies.
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Critical Paths
Blake and the Argument of Method
Dan Miller, Mark Bracher and Donald Ault, eds.
Duke University Press, 1987
The great expositors of Blake and those who have followed in their footsteps have clarified the most minute particulars of Blake's vision. Now, in the place of traditional exegesis, comes a significantly new set of critical problems and interpretive methods. In this volume of essays, the major shift in Blake studies, already under way in practice, is addressed, gauged, analyzed, and debated.

The contributors assembled here, leading exponents of contemporary critical methods as well as close students of Blake, argue the grounds, purposes, and validity of each approach and then apply its method in detailed readings of Blake's works. We see deconstruction, psychoanalytic interpretation, feminist critique, semiotic analysis, Marxist criticism, revisionism, and other methods brought to bear on Blake's texts and into confrontation with one another by those best able to do so.

Through the essays themselves and in the reaction they will certainly provoke, Critical Paths will bring increased theoretical awareness to the study of Blake and will further the ongoing redefinition of Blake's art. At the same time, the collection investigates the general problem of methodology in literary studies by means of a casebook examination of modern critical approaches. Blake criticism and current literary theory here come together; the encounter illuminates and enriches both.

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Critical Perspectives in International Studies
Frank P. Harvey and Michael Brecher, Editors
University of Michigan Press, 2002
Critical Perspectives in International Studies offers an exciting survey of recent approaches to the study of international politics, including critical theory, radical theory, constructivism, postmodernism, system change, and feminist and gender perspectives. The authors—among the founders and leaders of these innovative ways to comprehend and re-present world politics—reflect on the strengths and weaknesses of each school of thought and suggest future research agendas.
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Critical Perspectives on Contemporary Plays by Women
The Early Twenty-First Century
Penny Farfan and Lesley Ferris, Editors
University of Michigan Press, 2021

This book foregrounds some of the ways in which women playwrights from across a range of contexts and working in a variety of forms and styles are illuminating the contemporary world while also contributing to its reshaping as they reflect, rethink, and reimagine it through their work for the stage. The book is framed by a substantial introduction that sets forth the critical vision and structure of the book as a whole, and an afterword that points toward emerging currents in and expansions of the contemporary field of playwriting by women on the cusp of the third decade of the twenty-first century. Within this frame, the twenty-eight chapters that form the main body of the book, each focusing on a single play of critical significance, together constitute a multi-faceted, inevitably partial, yet nonetheless integral picture of the work of women playwrights since 2000 as they engage with some of the most pressing issues of our time. Some of these issues include the continuing oppression of and violence against women, people of color, LGBTQ+ people, and ethnic minorities; the ongoing processes of decolonization; the consequences of neoliberal capitalism; the devastation and enduring trauma of war; global migration and the refugee crisis; the turn to right-wing populism; and the impact of climate change, including environmental disaster and species extinction.

The book is structured into seven sections: Replaying the Canon; Representing Histories; Staging Lives; Re-imagining Family; Navigating Communities; Articulating Intersections; and New World Order(s). These sections group clusters of plays according to the broad critical actions they perform or, in the case of the final section, the new world orders that they capture through their stagings of the seeming impasse of the politically and environmentally catastrophic global present moment. There are many other points of resonance among and across the plays, but this seven-part structure foregrounds the broader actions that drive the plays, both in the Aristotelian dramaturgical sense and in the larger sense of the critical interventions that the plays creatively enact. In this way, the seven-part structure establishes correspondences across the great diversity of dramatic material represented in the book while at the same time identifying key methods of critical approach and areas of focus that align the book’s contributors across this diversity. The structure of the book thus parallels what the playwrights themselves are doing, but also how the contributors are approaching their work. Plays featured in the book are from Canada, Australia, South Africa, the US, the UK, France, Argentina, New Zealand, Syria, Brazil, Italy, and Austria; the playwrights include Margaret Atwood, Leah Purcell, Yaël Farber, Paula Vogel, Adrienne Kennedy, Suzan-Lori Parks, debbie tucker green, Lisa Loomer, Hélène Cixous. Anna Deavere Smith, Lola Arias, Lisa Kron and Jeanine Tesori, Marie Clements, Quiara Alegría Hudes, Alia Bano, Holly Hughes, Whiti Hereaka, Julia Cho, Liwaa Yazji, Grace Passô, Dominique Morisseau, Emma Dante, Frances Ya-Chu Cowhig, Lynn Nottage, Elfriede Jelinek, Caryl Churchill, Colleen Murphy, and Lucy Kirkwood.

Encompassing several generations of playwrights and scholars, ranging from the most senior to mid-career to emerging voices, the book will be essential reading for established researchers, a valuable learning resource for students at all levels, and a useful and accessible guide for theatre practitioners and interested theatre-goers.

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Critical Perspectives on Cultural Memory and Heritage
Construction, Transformation and Destruction
Edited by Veysel Apaydin
University College London, 2020
Critical Perspectives on Cultural Memory and Heritage focuses on the importance of memory and heritage for individual and group identity, and for their sense of belonging. It aims to expose the motives and discourses related to the destruction of memory and heritage during times of war, terror, sectarian conflict and through capitalist policies. It is within these affected spheres of cultural heritage where groups and communities ascribe values, develop memories, and shape their collective identity. It is an essential read for researchers in Museum and Heritage Studies, Archaeology and History who seek a global, comprehensive study of cultural memory and heritage.
 
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Critical Perspectives on Latino Education in Massachusetts
Lorna Rivera and Melissa Colón, editors
University of Massachusetts Press, 2025

In Massachusetts, the Latino population increased by 475 percent between 1980 and 2017, marking a dramatic growth. This diverse ethnic community of Puerto Ricans, Dominicans, Salvadoreans, Colombians, Brazilians, and more also contains a wide range of cultures, immigration and migration experiences, languages, and socio-political backgrounds. However, there are numerous commonalities involving education. Recent research at the Mauricio Gastón Institute for Latino Community Development and Policy reveals that Latino students in Massachusetts are more likely to attend public schools, in communities with significant academic achievement and opportunity gaps as well as other challenges, from food scarcity to higher rates of unemployment. At the same time, the state-wide shift to standards-based education has had a disproportionately negative impact on Latino students, who already feel the effects of politically motivated anti-immigrant policies and laws that limit bilingual education.

This collection of essays, from those working inside the classroom as well as researchers taking a broader look at policy, addresses the array of issues facing Latino students in Massachusetts. These perspectives paint a complex picture of the educational experience for Latinos, and offer expert suggestions for improving classrooms, school environments, and ultimate educational outcomes for an important growing demographic in the Commonwealth.

In addition to editors Lorna Rivera and Melissa Colón, this volume’s contributors include Almudena G. Abeyta, Nasteho Ali, Cristina Araujo Brinkerhoff, Michael Berardino, Alex Briesacher, Thomas Conroy, Judenie Dabel, Liya Escalera, Luis Enrique Esquivel, Deyja Enriquez, Isahiah Erilus, Nyal Fuentes, Jazmin Rubi Flete Gomez, Manuel Frau-Ramos, Kimberly A. S. Howard, Patricia Krueger-Henney, Steven Lue, Mary Jo Marion, Timothy E. Murphy, Cecilia Nardi, Laurie Occhipinti, Alexandra Oliver-Davila, Chong Myung Park, Angelica Rodriquez, Marta T. Rosa, Diana Santiago, Melissa Sargent, Ester Shapiro, V. Scott H. Solberg, Fabián Torres-Ardila, Ashley Torres Carrasquillo, Paul Trunfio, Carmen N. Veloria, and Heilam Xie.

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Critical Practices in Post-Franco Spain
Silvia L. Lopez, Jenaro Talens, and Dario Villanueva, Editors
University of Minnesota Press, 1994

Critical Practices in Post-Franco Spain was first published in 1994. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

This volume offers a sample of Spanish critical work in literary theory and cultural studies. Like all critical histories, Spain's is political: Philology dominated the critical scene during the Franco years, and after Franco, this hegemony has been contested by semiotics, poststructuralism, psychoanalysis, and feminisms. Without trying to represent all the theoretical projects presently underway in Spanish criticism, this book opens a window on the vast field of new critical practices in Spain and provides a general picture of influential theoretical currents.

The essays collected here range widely in topic and style, and they reflect a new generation's preoccupation with critical problems that go beyond the field of literary studies. The authors focus on new discourse in various print and electronic media, on the discursive construction of the museum space, and on literary theory as it confronts issues of translation, subjectivity, writing, and narratology.

Silvia López is assistant professor of Spanish at Carlton Collegea doctoral candidate in the departments of cultural studies and comparative literature at the University of Minnesota. Jenaro Talens is professor of Hispanic literature and comparative literature at the University of Geneva. He is the author of The Branded Eye: Buñuel's Un Chien Andalou, (Minnesota 1993). Darío Villanueva is professor of theory of literature at the University of Santiago de Compostela, Spain.

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Critical Prefaces of the French Renaissance
Bernard Weinberg
Northwestern University Press, 1950
Critical Prefaces of the French Renaissance contains nearly 30 prefaces from the works of French poets and dramatists published from 1525 to 1611. Bernard Weinberg’s helpful book collects prefaces from the works of satirical poets, as well as dramatists, and provides a short introduction to each preface setting it in its literary and historical context. Lyrical and satirical poets represented vary from Marot to Du Bellay to Ronsard. Dramatists represented include Jean de la Tille and Larivey, among others. The larger introduction to the volume provides literary analysis of five longer texts by Sebillet, Du Bellay, Peletier du Mans, the obscure Pierre De-laudun, and Horace. Weinberg’s study brings attention back to these primary writings that are crucial for an understanding of the period.
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Critical Problems in the History of Science
Proceedings of the Institute for the History of Science, 1957
Edited by Marshall Clagett
University of Wisconsin Press, 1969
"A permanent record of the proceedings of a particularly important Institute for the History of Science, held at the University of Wisconsin in 1957. Seventy-two distinguished historians of science took part in this stimulating and serious exchange of ideas covering many aspects of ancient, medieval, and modern scientific thought."—The New Scholasticism

"This publication indicates in a striking manner the catholicity of the history of science; professors of philosophy, the history of science, the philosophy of science, history, biology, and metallurgy readily conferred with one another."—The American Historical Review
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Critical Questions
On Music and Letters, Culture and Biography, 1940-1980
Jacques Barzun
University of Chicago Press, 1982
This collection of writings allows the reader a rare opportunity to see Barzun's lively, engaging, rich, and original mind at work on several strategic areas of cultural inquiry: music and the musical life, esthetics, biography, criticism, and social commentary. Barzun makes use of a variety of contexts as a forum for evidence and opinion, including essays, program notes, letters, and reviews. And he approaches a wide variety of particular and general questions. What is it like to sit in on a recording session with a great orchestra? What is the role of the piano in Western culture? What is art in relation to objective reality and to the perceiving mind? Can one translate music into words? What is cultural history?

For anyone unfamiliar with Barzun's work, Critical Questions will serve as a valuable introduction to one of the most important cultural historians of our time. Others will be glad to have these pieces—most of them no longer easily available—brought together in a single volume. Uniformly insightful, provocative, and a pleasure to read, they show the consistency of Barzun's thought even as they exhibit diversity.
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Critical Race Theory 2Nd Ed
Richard Delgado
Temple University Press, 1999
In this wide-ranging second edition, Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic bring together the  finest, most illustrative, and highly accessible articles in the fast-growing legal  genre of Critical Race Theory. In challenging orthodoxy, questioning the premises of liberalism, and debating sacred wisdoms, Critical Race Theory scholars writing over the past few years have indelibly changed the way America looks at race.

This edition contains treatment of all the topics covered in the first edition, along with provocative and probing questions for discussion and detailed suggestions for additional reading, all of which set this fine volume apart from the field. In addition, this edition contains five new substantive units -- crime, critical race practice, intergroup tensions and alliances, gay/lesbian issues, and transcending the black-white binary paradigm of race. In each of these areas, groundbreaking scholarship by the movement's founding figures as well as the brightest new stars provides immediate entre to current trends and developments in critical civil rights thought.
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Critical Race Theory
The Cutting Edge
Richard Delgado
Temple University Press, 2013
Critical Race Theory has become a dynamic, eclectic, and growing movement in the study of law. With this third edition of Critical Race Theory, editors Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic have created a reader for the twenty-first century-one that shakes up the legal academy, questions comfortable liberal premises, and leads the search for new ways of thinking about our nation's most intractable, and insoluble, problem-race.

The contributions, from a stellar roster of established and emerging scholars, address new topics, such as intersectionality and black men on the "down low." Essays also confront much-discussed issues of discrimination, workplace dynamics, affirmative action, and sexual politics. Also new to this volume are updated section introductions, author notes, questions for discussion, and reading lists for each unit. The volume also covers the spread of the movement to other disciplines such as education.

Offering a comprehensive and stimulating snapshot of current race jurisprudence and thought, this new edition of Critical Race Theory is essential for those interested in law, the multiculturalism movement, political science, education, and critical thought.

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A Critical Review of Research in Land Economics
Leonard A. Salter, Jr.
University of Minnesota Press, 1948

A Critical Review of Research in Land Economics was first published in 1948. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

Research relating to the economic problems of agriculture has seen rapid and extensive development during the last three decades. Funds now becoming available through the research and marketing act, together with financial support from other sources, promise further expansion and growth in the study of the economic problems of agriculture, and consequently a keen interest in research methods and approaches.

While this book deals specifically with research progress and methods in the field of land economics, the author's findings and conclusions offer guides to research workers and students in agricultural economics and the social sciences generally. Dr. Salter has set up certain basic requirements for evaluating research reports. He makes a comprehensive analysis of the research methodology now used by social scientists and land economists, and forcefully presents the case for use of experimental method in these fields. Those charged with the responsibility for initiating, planning, and carrying out research studies in social sciences will find stimulus and guidance in this book.

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Critical Studies in Art and Design Education
Edited by Richard Hickman
Intellect Books, 2005
This book reviews past practice and theory in critical studies and discusses various trends; some papers keenly advocate a re-conceptualisation of the whole subject area, while others describe aspects of current and past practice which exemplify the "symbiotic" relationship between practical studio work and critical engagement with visual form.

Rod Taylor, who has done much to promote and develop critical studies in the UK, provides us with examples of classroom practice and gives us his more recent thoughts on fundamental issues – "universal themes" in art – and gives examples of how both primary and secondary schools might develop their teaching of art through attending to themes such as "identity," "myth," and "environments" to help "re-animate the practical curriculum."

Although some of the discussion in this book centres on or arises from the English National curriculum, the issues are more global, and relevant to anyone involved in developing or delivering art curricula in schools. An American perspective is given in papers by George Geahigan and Paul Duncum. Geahigan outlines an approach to teaching about visual form which begins with students' personal responses and is developed through structured instruction. In Duncum’s vision of ‘visual culture art education’ sites such as theme parks and shopping malls are the focus of students' critical attention in schools; Nick Stanley gives a lucid account of just such an enterprise, giving practical examples of ways to engage students with this particular form of visual pleasure.

This publication serves to highlight some of the more pressing issues of concern to art and design teachers in two aspects. Firstly it seeks to contextualise the development of critical studies, discussing its place in the general curriculum – possibly as a discrete subject – and secondly it examines different approaches to its teaching.
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Critical Studies in Indian Grammarians I
The Theory of Homogeneity (Savar?ya)
Madhav M. Deshpande
University of Michigan Press, 1975
In the historical study of the Indian grammarian tradition, a line of demarcation can often be drawn between the conformity of a system with the well-known grammar of Pāṇini and the explanatory effectiveness of that system. One element of Pāṇini’s grammar that scholars have sometimes struggled to bring across this line of demarcation is the theory of homogeneity, or sāvarṇya, which concerns the final consonants in Pāṇini’s reference catalog, as well as phonetic similarities between sounds. While modern Sanskrit scholars understand how to interpret and apply Pāṇini’s homogeneity, they still find it necessary to unravel the history of varying interpretations of the theory in subsequent grammars.
Madhav Deshpande’s The Theory of Homogeneity provides a thorough account of the historical development of the theory. Proceeding first to study this conception in the Pāṇinian tradition, Deshpande then passes on to other grammatical systems. Deshpande gives attention not only to the definitions of homogeneity in these systems but also the implementation of the theory in those respective systems. Even where definitions are identical, the concept may be applied quite differently, in which cases Deshpande examines by considering the historical relationships among the various systems.
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Critical Studies in Organization and Bureaucracy
Revised and Expanded
Frank Fischer
Temple University Press, 1993

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Critical Study Of Work
edited by Rick Baldoz, Charles Koeber and Philip Kraft
Temple University Press, 2001
Two broad developments reshaped work at the end of the twentieth century. The first was the implosion of the Soviet Union and the worldwide triumph of market capitalism. The second was the increasing use of computer-based production technologies and management command-and-control systems. How do we make sense of these important developments.

The editors have assembled a collection of provocative, original essays on work and workplaces throughout the world that challenge the current celebration of globalization and new technologies. Building on labor process analysis, individual case studies venture beyond factory and office to examine "virtual" workplaces, computer-era cottage work, and emotional and household labor. The settings range from Indian and Irish software factories to Brazilian supermarkets, Los Angeles sweatshops, and Taiwanese department stores.

Other essays seek to make theoretical sense of increasingly de-centered production chains, fluid work relations, and uncertain employment. Individually and collectively the authors construct a new critical study of work, highlighting the connections between geography, technology, gender, race, and class. They offer an accessible and flexible approach to the study of workplace relations and production organization -- and even  the notion of work itself.
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The Critical Surf Studies Reader
Dexter Zavalza Hough-Snee and Alexander Sotelo Eastman, editors
Duke University Press, 2017
The evolution of surfing—from the first forms of wave-riding in Oceania, Africa, and the Americas to the inauguration of surfing as a competitive sport at the 2020 Tokyo Olympics—traverses the age of empire, the rise of globalization, and the onset of the digital age, taking on new meanings at each juncture. As corporations have sought to promote surfing as a lifestyle and leisure enterprise, the sport has also narrated its own epic myths that place North America at the center of surf culture and relegate Hawai‘i and other indigenous surfing cultures to the margins. The Critical Surf Studies Reader brings together eighteen interdisciplinary essays that explore surfing's history and development as a practice embedded in complex and sometimes oppositional social, political, economic, and cultural relations. Refocusing the history and culture of surfing, this volume pays particular attention to reclaiming the roles that women, indigenous peoples, and people of color have played in surfing.

Contributors. Douglas Booth, Peter Brosius, Robin Canniford, Krista Comer, Kevin Dawson, Clifton Evers, Chris Gibson, Dina Gilio-Whitaker, Dexter Zavalza Hough-Snee, Scott Laderman, Kristin Lawler, lisahunter, Colleen McGloin, Patrick Moser, Tara Ruttenberg, Cori Schumacher, Alexander Sotelo Eastman, Glen Thompson, Isaiah Helekunihi Walker, Andrew Warren, Belinda Wheaton
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A Critical Synergy
Race, Decoloniality, and World Crises
Meghji, Ali
Temple University Press, 2023
Practitioners of decolonial theory and critical race theory (CRT) often use one or the other, but not both. In his provocative book, A Critical Synergy, Ali Meghji suggests using the two theories in tandem rather than attempting to hierarchize or synthesize them. Doing so allows for the study of social phenomena in a way that captures their global and historical roots, while acknowledging their local, national, and contemporary particularities.

The differences between decolonial thought and CRT, Meghji insists, does not necessarily imply one approach is stronger. Rather, he asserts, they often provide alternative but not incompatible viewpoints of the same social problem. Meghji presents case studies of capitalism, the COVID-19 pandemic, climate crisis, and twenty-first-century far-right populism to show that with both theories, we can understand more, as insights may be lost by using only one.

Meghji is not calling for a universal theoretical synthesis in A Critical Synergy, but rather a practice that can help open sociology and social science to the tradition of pluriversality much more broadly.
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Critical Teaching and Everyday Life
Ira Shor
University of Chicago Press, 1987
In this unique book on education, Shor develops teaching theory side-by-side with a political analysis of schooling. Drawing on the work of Paulo Freire, he offers the first practical and theoretical guide to Freirean methods for American classrooms. Central to his method is a commitment to learning through dialogue and to exploring themes from everyday life. He poses alienation and mass culture as key obstacles to learning, and establishes critical literacy as a foundation for studying any subject.
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Critical Terms for Animal Studies
Edited by Lori Gruen
University of Chicago Press, 2018
An essential primer and handbook for students and scholars in Animal Studies

Animal Studies is a rapidly growing interdisciplinary field devoted to examining, understanding, and critically evaluating the complex relationships between humans and
other animals. Scholarship in Animal Studies draws on a variety of methodologies to explore these multi-faceted relationships in order to help us understand the ways in which other animals figure in our lives and we in theirs. 

Bringing together the work of a group of internationally distinguished scholars, the contribution in Critical Terms for Animal Studies offers distinct voices and diverse perspectives, exploring significant concepts and asking important questions. How do we take non-human animals seriously, not simply as metaphors for human endeavors, but as subjects themselves? What do we mean by anthropocentrism, captivity, empathy, sanctuary, and vulnerability, and what work do these and other critical terms do in Animal Studies?

An indispensable reference for the field, Critical Terms for Animal Studies not only provides a framework for thinking about animals as subjects of their own experiences, but also serves as a touchstone to help us think differently about our conceptions of what it means to be human, and the impact human activities have on the more than human world.
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Critical Terms for Art History, Second Edition
Edited by Robert S. Nelson and Richard Shiff
University of Chicago Press, 2003
"Art" has always been contested terrain, whether the object in question is a medieval tapestry or Duchamp's Fountain. But questions about the categories of "art" and "art history" acquired increased urgency during the 1970s, when new developments in critical theory and other intellectual projects dramatically transformed the discipline. The first edition of Critical Terms for Art History both mapped and contributed to those transformations, offering a spirited reassessment of the field's methods and terminology.

Art history as a field has kept pace with debates over globalization and other social and political issues in recent years, making a second edition of this book not just timely, but crucial. Like its predecessor, this new edition consists of essays that cover a wide variety of "loaded" terms in the history of art, from sign to meaning, ritual to commodity. Each essay explains and comments on a single term, discussing the issues the term raises and putting the term into practice as an interpretive framework for a specific work of art. For example, Richard Shiff discusses "Originality" in Vija Celmins's To Fix the Image in Memory, a work made of eleven pairs of stones, each consisting of one "original" stone and one painted bronze replica.

In addition to the twenty-two original essays, this edition includes nine new ones—performance, style, memory/monument, body, beauty, ugliness, identity, visual culture/visual studies, and social history of art—as well as new introductory material. All help expand the book's scope while retaining its central goal of stimulating discussion of theoretical issues in art history and making that discussion accessible to both beginning students and senior scholars.

Contributors: Mark Antliff, Nina Athanassoglou-Kallmyer, Stephen Bann, Homi K. Bhabha, Suzanne Preston Blier, Michael Camille, David Carrier, Craig Clunas, Whitney Davis, Jas Elsner, Ivan Gaskell, Ann Gibson, Charles Harrison, James D. Herbert, Amelia Jones, Wolfgang Kemp, Joseph Leo Koerner, Patricia Leighten, Paul Mattick Jr., Richard Meyer, W. J. T. Mitchell, Robert S. Nelson, Margaret Olin, William Pietz, Alex Potts, Donald Preziosi, Lisbet Rausing, Richard Shiff, Terry Smith, Kristine Stiles, David Summers, Paul Wood, James E. Young
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Critical Terms for Literary Study, Second Edition
Edited by Frank Lentricchia and Thomas McLaughlin
University of Chicago Press, 1995
An essential primer and guide to literary studies for students and scholars

Critical Terms for Literary Study is an essential handbook and introduction to the work of literary theory. Covering a broad range of key terms that include popular culture, diversity, imperialism, ethics, desire, class, gender, race, canon, representation, and much more through essays by leading scholars, it provides a concise history of each term alongside a critical exploration of the issues and questions for the field that it raises, followed by demonstrations of reading strategies driven by the term.

Exploring the concepts that shape the way we read, the essays combine to provide an extraordinary introduction to the work of literature and literary study, as the nation's most distinguished scholars put the tools of critical practice vividly to use.
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Critical Terms for Media Studies
Edited by W. J. T. Mitchell and Mark B. N. Hansen
University of Chicago Press, 2010
An essential guide to the field of media studies for any student or scholar

Communications, philosophy, film and video, digital culture: media studies straddles an astounding array of fields and disciplines and produces a vocabulary that is in equal parts rigorous and intuitive. Critical Terms for Media Studies defines, and at times, redefines, what this new and hybrid area aims to do, illuminating the key concepts behind its liveliest debates and most dynamic topics.

Part of a larger conversation that engages culture, technology, and politics, this exciting collection of essays explores our most critical language for dealing with the qualities and modes of contemporary media. Edited by two outstanding scholars in the field, W. J. T. Mitchell and Mark B. N. Hansen, the volume features works by a team of distinguished contributors. These essays, commissioned expressly for this volume, are organized into three interrelated groups: “Aesthetics” engages with terms that describe sensory experiences and judgments, “Technology” offers entry into a broad array of technological concepts, and “Society” opens up language describing the systems that allow a medium to function.

A compelling reference work for our media landscape, Critical Terms for Media Studies will engage and deepen any reader’s knowledge of one of our most important new fields.
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Critical Terms for Religious Studies
Edited by Mark C. Taylor
University of Chicago Press, 1998
A century that began with modernism sweeping across Europe is ending with a remarkable resurgence of religious beliefs and practices throughout the world. Wherever one looks today, from headlines about political turmoil in the Middle East to pop music and videos, one cannot escape the pivotal role of religious beliefs and practices in shaping selves, societies, and cultures.

Following in the very successful tradition of Critical Terms for Literary Studies and Critical Terms for Art History, this book attempts to provide a revitalized, self-aware vocabulary with which this bewildering religious diversity can be accurately described and responsibly discussed. Leading scholars working in a variety of traditions demonstrate through their incisive discussions that even our most basic terms for understanding religion are not neutral but carry specific historical and conceptual freight.

These essays adopt the approach that has won this book's predecessors such widespread acclaim: each provides a concise history of a critical term, explores the issues raised by the term, and puts the term to use in an analysis of a religious work, practice, or event. Moving across Judaism, Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam, and Native American and Mayan religions, contributors explore terms ranging from experience, territory, and image, to God, sacrifice, and transgression.

The result is an essential reference that will reshape the field of religious studies and transform the way in which religion is understood by scholars from all disciplines, including anthropology, sociology, psychology, cultural studies, gender studies, and literary studies.
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Critical Terms for Religious Studies, Second Edition
Edited by Sarah Hammerschlag
University of Chicago Press, 2025
A new edition of a classic resource—composed of twenty-three essays written specifically for this volume.

First published nearly thirty years ago, Critical Terms for Religious Studies proved a vital resource for an emerging interdisciplinary conversation. We still use much of the same language in the study of religion, but fresh concerns have both changed the meaning of terms and given rise to new terms altogether. This edition consists of twenty-three entirely new essays that offer students and scholars alike the tools to historicize and evaluate the shifting role of familiar and emerging critical terms in religious studies.

These are “critical terms” both because they are important in our cultural moment and because thinking through them reveals how religions are embedded in and shaped by material, social, economic, and political forces. A shared conviction unites contributors from a range of traditions and methodologies: a recognition that our world is saturated by the persistence of religious traditions as shape-shifting (not static or transcendent) forces of authority, as powerful today as ever before.
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Critical Terms for the Study of Africa
Edited by Gaurav Desai and Adeline Masquelier
University of Chicago Press, 2018
For far too long, the Western world viewed Africa as unmappable terrain—a repository for outsiders’ wildest imaginings. This problematic notion has had lingering effects not only on popular impressions of the region but also on the development of the academic study of Africa. Critical Terms for the Study of Africa considers the legacies that have shaped our understanding of the continent and its place within the conceptual grammar of contemporary world affairs.
 
Written by a distinguished group of scholars, the essays compiled in this volume take stock of African studies today and look toward a future beyond its fraught intellectual and political past. Each essay discusses one of our most critical terms for talking about Africa, exploring the trajectory of its development while pushing its boundaries. Editors Gaurav Desai and Adeline Masquelier balance the choice of twenty-five terms between the expected and the unexpected, calling for nothing short of a new mapping of the scholarly field. The result is an essential reference that will challenge assumptions, stimulate lively debate, and make the past, present, and future of African Studies accessible to students and teachers alike.
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Critical Terms for the Study of Buddhism
Edited by Donald S. Lopez Jr.
University of Chicago Press, 2005
Over the past century, Buddhism has come to be seen as a world religion, exceeding Christianity in longevity and, according to many, philosophical wisdom. Buddhism has also increasingly been described as strongly ethical, devoted to nonviolence, and dedicated to bringing an end to human suffering. And because it places such a strong emphasis on rational analysis, Buddhism is considered more compatible with science than the other great religions. As such, Buddhism has been embraced in the West, both as an alternative religion and as an alternative to religion.

This volume provides a unique introduction to Buddhism by examining categories essential for a nuanced understanding of its traditions. Each of the fifteen essays here shows students how a fundamental term—from art to word—illuminates the practice of Buddhism, both in traditional Buddhist societies and in the realms of modernity. Apart from Buddha, the list of terms in this collection deliberately includes none that are intrinsic to the religion. Instead, the contributors explore terms that are important for many fields and that invite interdisciplinary reflection. Through incisive discussions of topics ranging from practice, power, and pedagogy to ritual, history, sex, and death, the authors offer new directions for the understanding of Buddhism, taking constructive and sometimes polemical positions in an effort both to demonstrate the shortcomings of assumptions about the religion and the potential power of revisionary approaches.

Following the tradition of Critical Terms for Religious Studies, this volume is not only an invaluable resource for the classroom but one that belongs on the short list of essential books for anyone seriously interested in Buddhism and Asian religions.
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Critical Terms for the Study of Gender
Edited by Catharine R. Stimpson and Gilbert Herdt
University of Chicago Press, 2014
“Gender systems pervade and regulate human lives—in law courts and operating rooms, ballparks and poker clubs, hair-dressing salons and kitchens, classrooms and playgroups. . . . Exactly how gender works varies from culture to culture, and from historical period to historical period, but gender is very rarely not at work. Nor does gender operate in isolation. It is linked to other social structures and sources of identity.”
 
So write women’s studies pioneer Catharine R. Stimpson and anthropologist Gilbert Herdt in their introduction to Critical Terms for the Study of Gender, laying out the wide-ranging nature of this interdisciplinary and rapidly changing field. The sixth in the series of “Critical Terms” books, this volume provides an indispensable introduction to the study of gender through an exploration of key terms that are a part of everyday discourse in this vital subject.
 
Following Stimpson and Herdt’s careful account of the evolution of gender studies and its relation to women’s and sexuality studies, the twenty-one essays here cast an appropriately broad net, spanning the study of gender and sexuality across the humanities and social sciences. Written by a distinguished group of scholars, each essay presents students with a history of a given term—from bodies to utopia—and explains the conceptual baggage it carries and the kinds of critical work it can be made to do. The contributors offer incisive discussions of topics ranging from desire, identityjustice, and kinship to loverace, and religion that suggest new directions for the understanding of gender studies. The result is an essential reference addressed to students studying gender in very different disciplinary contexts.
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Critical Theories of the State
Marxist, Neomarxist, Postmarxist
Clyde W. Barrow
University of Wisconsin Press, 1993

Critical Theories of the State is a clear and accessible survey of radical perspectives on the modern state.  By focusing on Marxist theory and its variations, particularly as applied to advanced industrial societies and contemporary welfare states, Clyde W. Barrow provides a more extensive and thorough treatment than is available in any other work. 
    Barrow divides the methodological assumptions and key hypotheses of Marxist, Neo-Marxist, and Post-Marxist theories into five distinct approaches: instrumentalist, structuralist, derivationist, systems-analytic, and organizational realist. He categorizes the many theorists discussed in the book, including such thinkers as Elmer Altvater, G. William Domhoff, Fred Block, Claus Offe, and Theda Skocpol according to their concepts of the state’s relationship to capital and their methodological approach to the state.   Based on this survey, Barrow elaborates a compelling typology of radical state theories that identifies with remarkable clarity crucial points of overlap and divergence among the various theories.  
    Scholars conducting research within the rubric of state theory, political development, and policy history will find Critical Theories of the State an immensely valuable review of the literature.  Moreover, Barrow’s work will make an excellent textbook for undergraduate and graduate courses in political science and sociology, and can also be used by those teaching theory courses in international relations, history, and political economy.

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Critical Theory and Authoritarian Populism
Jeremiah Morelock
University of Westminster Press, 2018
After President Trump’s election, BREXIT and the widespread rise of far-Right political parties, much public discussion has intensely focused on populism and authoritarianism. In the middle of the twentieth century, members of the early Frankfurt School prolifically studied and theorized fascism and anti-Semitism in Germany and the United States. In this volume, leading European and American scholars apply insights from the early Frankfurt School to present-day authoritarian populism, including the Trump phenomenon and related developments across the globe. Chapters are arranged into three sections exploring different aspects of the topic: theories, historical foundations, and manifestations via social media. Contributions examine the vital political, psychological and anthropological theories of early Frankfurt School thinkers, and how their insights could be applied now amidst the insecurities and confusions of twenty-first century life. The many theorists considered include Adorno, Fromm, Löwenthal and Marcuse, alongside analysis of Austrian Facebook pages and Trump’s tweets and operatic media drama. This book is a major contribution towards deeper understanding of populism’s resurgence in the age of digital capitalism.
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Critical Theory and Performance
Revised and Enlarged Edition
Janelle G. Reinelt and Joseph R. Roach, Editors
University of Michigan Press, 2007

Critical Theory and Performance presents a broad range of critical and theoretical methods and applies them to contemporary and historical performance genres—from stage plays, dance-dramas, performance art, cabaret, stand-up comedy, and jazz to circus, street theater, and shamanistic ritual. As the first comprehensive introduction to critical theory’s rich and diverse contributions to the study of drama, theater, and performance, the book has been highly influential for more than a decade in providing fertile ground for academic investigations in the lively field of performance studies.

This updated and expanded edition presents nineteen new essays by the field’s leading scholars and practitioners as well as new critical introductions by editors Janelle G. Reinelt and Joseph R. Roach. Reflecting recent trends in performance studies, this revised edition now includes discussions of critical race theory, postcolonial studies, gender and sexualities, and mediatized cultures. The resulting volume is a unique and indispensable tool for critics, teachers, and students that paves the way for future scholarship.

Janelle G. Reinelt is Professor of Theatre and Performance at the University of Warwick. Reinelt and Roach

Joseph R. Roach is Charles C. and Dorathea S. Dilley Professor of Theater and English at Yale University.

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Critical Theory of Communication
New Readings of Lukács, Adorno, Marcuse, Honneth and Habermas in the Age of the Internet
Christian Fuchs
University of Westminster Press, 2016

This book contributes to the foundations of a critical theory of communication as shaped by the forces of digital capitalism. One of the world's leading theorists of digital media Professor Christian Fuchs explores how the thought of some of the Frankfurt School’s key thinkers can be deployed for critically understanding media in the age of the Internet. Five essays that form the heart of this book review aspects of the works of Georg Lukács, Theodor W. Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, Axel Honneth and Jürgen Habermas and apply them as elements of a critical theory of communication's foundations. The approach taken starts from Georg Lukács Ontology of Social Being, draws on the work of the Frankfurt School thinkers, and sets them into dialogue with the Cultural Materialism of Raymond Williams.

Critical Theory of Communication offers a vital set of new insights on how communication operates in the age of information, digital media and social media, arguing that we need to transcend the communication theory of Habermas by establishing a dialectical and cultural-materialist critical theory of communication. It is the first title in a major new book series 'Critical Digital and Social Media Studies' published by the University of Westminster Press.

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Critical Theory to Structuralism
Philosophy, Politics, and the Human Sciences
Edited by David Ingram
University of Chicago Press, 2010

From Kant to Kierkegaard, from Hegel to Heidegger, continental philosophers have indelibly shaped the trajectory of Western thought since the eighteenth century. Although much has been written about these monumental thinkers, students and scholars lack a definitive guide to the entire scope of the continental tradition. The most comprehensive reference work to date, this eight-volume History of Continental Philosophy will both encapsulate the subject and reorient our understanding of it. Beginning with an overview of Kant’s philosophy and its initial reception, the History traces the evolution of continental philosophy through major figures as well as movements such as existentialism, phenomenology, hermeneutics, and poststructuralism. The final volume outlines the current state of the field, bringing the work of both historical and modern thinkers to bear on such contemporary topics as feminism, globalization, and the environment. Throughout, the volumes examine important philosophical figures and developments in their historical, political, and cultural contexts.

The first reference of its kind, A History of Continental Philosophy has been written and edited by internationally recognized experts with a commitment to explaining complex thinkers, texts, and movements in rigorous yet jargon-free essays suitable for both undergraduates and seasoned specialists. These volumes also elucidate ongoing debates about the nature of continental and analytic philosophy, surveying the distinctive, sometimes overlapping characteristics and approaches of each tradition. Featuring helpful overviews of major topics and plotting road maps to their underlying contexts, A History of Continental Philosophy is destined to be the resource of first and last resort for students and scholars alike.

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The Critical Thinking About Sources Cookbook
Sarah E. Morris
Assoc of College & Research Libraries, 2020

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Critical Transitions
Writing and the Question of Transfer
Chris M Anson
University Press of Colorado, 2017
In Critical Transitions: Writing and the Question of Transfer, Chris Anson and Jessie Moore offer an important new collection about prior learning and transfer theories that asks what writing knowledge should transfer, how we might recognize that transfer, and what the significance is—from a global perspective—of understanding knowledge transformation related to writing. The contributors examine strategies for supporting writers' transfer at key critical transitions, including transitions from high-school to college, from first-year writing to writing in the major and in the disciplines, between self-sponsored and academic writing, and between languages. The collection concludes with an epilogue offering next steps in studying and designing for writing transfer.

Contributors: Linda Adler-Kassner, Chris M. Anson, Stuart Blythe, Scott Chien-Hsiung Chiu, Irene Clark, Nicolette Mercer Clement, Stacey M. Cozart, Gita DasBender, Christiane Donahue, Dana Lynn Driscoll, Dana R. Ferris, Gwen Gorzelsky, Regina A. McManigell Grijalva, Carol Hayes, Hogan Hayes, Tine Wirenfeldt Jensen, Ed Jones, Ketevan Kupatadze, Jessie L. Moore, Joe Paszek, Donna Qualley, Liane Robertson, Paula Rosinski, Kara Taczak, Elizabeth Wardle, Carl Whithaus, Gitte Wichmann-Hansen, Kathleen Blake Yancey
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The Critical Turn
Rhetoric and Philosophy in Postmodern Discourse
Edited by Ian Angus and Lenore Langsdorf
Southern Illinois University Press, 1992

Concerned with criticizing representational theories of knowledge by developing alternative concepts of knowing and communicating, Ian Angus and Lenore Langsdorf bring together eight essays that are united by a common theme: the convergence of philosophy and rhetoric.

In the first chapter, Angus and Langsdorf illustrate the centrality of critical reasoning to the nature of questioning itself, arguing that human inquiry has entered a "new situation" where "the convictions and orientations that have traditionally marked the separation of rhetoric and philosophy—the concern for truth and the focus on persuasion—have begun to converge on a new space that can be defined through the central term discourse."In these essays, this convergence of rhetoric and philosophy is addressed as it presents itself to a variety of interests that transcend the traditional boundaries of these fields.

The two editors, Raymie E. McKerrow, Michael J. Hyde and Craig R. Smith, James W. Hikins and Kenneth S. Zagacki, Calvin O. Schrag and David James Miller, and Richard L. Lanigan map this new space, recognizing that such mapping "simultaneously constitutes the territory mapped."

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Critical Understanding
The Powers and Limits of Pluralism
Wayne C. Booth
University of Chicago Press, 1979
Critics will always disagree, but, maintains Wayne Booth, their disagreement need not result in critical chaos. In Critical Understanding, Booth argues for a reasoned pluralism—a criticism more various and resourceful than can be caught in any one critic's net. He relates three noted pluralists—Ronald Crane, Kenneth Burke, and M. H. Abrams—to various currently popular critical approaches. Throughout, Booth tests the abstractions of metacriticism against particular literary works, devoting a substantial portion of his discussion to works by W. H. Auden, Henry James, Oliver Goldsmith, and Anatole France.
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Critical White Studies
Richard Delgado
Temple University Press, 1997
No longer content with accepting whiteness as the norm, critical scholars have turned their attention to whiteness itself. In Critical White Studies: Looking Behind the Mirror, numerous thinkers, including Toni Morrison, Eric Foner, Peggy McIntosh, Andrew Hacker, Ruth Frankenberg, John Howard Griffin, David Roediger, Kathleen Heal Cleaver, Noel Ignatiev, Cherrie Moraga, and Reginald Horsman, attack such questions as:

*How was whiteness invented, and why?
*How has the category whiteness changed over time?
*Why did some immigrant groups, such as the Irish and Jews, start out as nonwhite and later became white?
*Can some individual people be both white and nonwhite at different times, and what does it mean to "pass for white"?
*At what point does pride in being white cross the line into white power or white supremacy?
*What can whites concerned over racial inequity or white privilege do about it?

Science and pseudoscience are presented side by side to demonstrate how our views on whiteness often reflect preconception, not fact. For example, most scientists hold that race is not a valid scientific category -- genetic differences between races are insignificant compared to those within them. Yet, the "one drop" rule, whereby those with any nonwhite heritage are classified as nonwhite, persists even today. As the bell curve controversy shows, race concepts die hard, especially when power and prestige lie behind them.

A sweeping portrait of the emerging field of whiteness studies, Critical White Studies presents, for the first time, the best work from sociology, law, history, cultural studies, and literature. Delgado and Stefancic expressly offer critical white studies as the next step in critical race theory. In focusing on whiteness, not only do they ask nonwhites to investigate more closely for what it means for others to be white, but also they invite whites to examine themselves more searchingly and to "look behind the mirror."
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Critical Writings, 1953-1978
Paul De Man
University of Minnesota Press, 1989

Twenty-five essays and reviews not previously collected, most of which were written before 1970, and eight of which are appearing in English for the first time. Valuable for the insights they afford into his development as a critic the essays are also significant in addressing de Man’s consistent views of romanticism, modernism and the dilemmas central to literature in recent centuries.

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Critically Capitalist
The Spirit of Asset Capitalism in South Korea
Bohyeong Kim
University of Michigan Press, 2025
Critically Capitalist presents an ethnography of South Korea’s asset seekers, including amateur stock investors, real estate enthusiasts, and money coaches, to demonstrate how financialized asset capitalism is sustained. As they hunt for profit margins, rent, and dividends, they simultaneously critique capitalism and posit their pursuit of assets as a form of resistance. Bohyeong Kim theorizes this new spirit of capitalism in South Korea as “critical capitalism,” arguing that it reflects the popular discontent with both national development and financial neoliberalism. As a paradoxical critique and legitimation, Bohyeong Kim argues that critical capitalism valorizes the capitalist economy not through a triumphant narrative, but by highlighting the emotional wounds, destroyed communities, and oppressive tactics of modern capitalism. 

Drawing on multi-sited ethnography and in-depth interviews with a broad community of aspiring millionaires, Critically Capitalist illuminates how contemporary capitalism thrives by channeling discontent into financial and real estate markets, which in turn has cemented critical capitalism as the cultural and affective backbone of South Korea’s economy.
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Critically Sovereign
Indigenous Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies
Joanne Barker, editor
Duke University Press, 2017
Critically Sovereign traces the ways in which gender is inextricably a part of Indigenous politics and U.S. and Canadian imperialism and colonialism. The contributors show how gender, sexuality, and feminism work as co-productive forces of Native American and Indigenous sovereignty, self-determination, and epistemology. Several essays use a range of literary and legal texts to analyze the production of colonial space, the biopolitics of “Indianness,” and the collisions and collusions between queer theory and colonialism within Indigenous studies. Others address the U.S. government’s criminalization of traditional forms of Diné marriage and sexuality, the Iñupiat people's changing conceptions of masculinity as they embrace the processes of globalization, Hawai‘i’s same-sex marriage bill, and stories of Indigenous women falling in love with non-human beings such as animals, plants, and stars. Following the politics of gender, sexuality, and feminism across these diverse historical and cultural contexts, the contributors question and reframe the thinking about Indigenous knowledge, nationhood, citizenship, history, identity, belonging, and the possibilities for a decolonial future.

Contributors. Jodi A. Byrd, Joanne Barker, Jennifer Nez Denetdale, Mishuana Goeman,  J. Kēhaulani Kauanui, Melissa K. Nelson, Jessica Bissett Perea, Mark Rifkin
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Criticism and Social Change
Frank Lentricchia
University of Chicago Press, 1984
"Criticism and Social Change speaks with special timeliness to the role of the political intellectual (here embodied in Kenneth Burke). Lentricchia's provocative analysis demands serious reflection by American radicals."—Frederic Jameson

"A profound meditation on relations obtaining among writing, political consciousness, and criticism—this last taken in its most general sense. It is written with passion and grace; it is shot through with learning, intimate knowledge of the critical tradition, and a deep (though by no means uncritical) understanding of the work (as well as social significance) of Kenneth Burke."—Hayden White
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Criticism and Truth
On Method in Literary Studies
Jonathan Kramnick
University of Chicago Press, 2023
A defense and celebration of the discipline of literary studies and its most distinctive practice—close reading.

Does literary criticism offer truths about the world? In Criticism and Truth, Jonathan Kramnick offers a new and surprising account of criticism’s power by zeroing in on its singular method: close reading. Long recognized as the distinctive technique of literary studies, close reading is the critic’s way of pursuing arguments and advancing knowledge, as well as the primary skill taught in the English major. But it is also more than that—a creative, immersive, and transformative writing practice that fosters a unique kind of engagement with the world. Drawing on the rich and varied landscape of contemporary criticism, Kramnick changes how we think about the basic tools of literary analysis, including the art of in-text quotation, summary, and other reading methods, helping us to see them as an invaluable form of humanistic expertise. Criticism and Truth is a call to arms, making a powerful case for the necessity of both literature and criticism within a multidisciplinary university.

As the humanities fight for survival in contemporary higher education, the study of literature doesn’t need more plans for reform. Rather, it needs a defense of the work already being done and an account of why it should flourish. This is what Criticism and Truth offers, in vivid and portable form.
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Criticism in the Borderlands
Studies in Chicano Literature, Culture, and Ideology
Héctor Calderón and José David Saldívar, eds.
Duke University Press, 1991
This pathbreaking anthology of Chicano literary criticism, with essays on a remarkable range of texts—both old and new—draws on diverse perspectives in contemporary literary and cultural studies: from ethnographic to postmodernist, from Marxist to feminist, from cultural materialist to new historicist.
The editors have organized essays around four board themes: the situation of Chicano literary studies within American literary history and debates about the “canon”; representations of the Chicana/o subject; genre, ideology, and history; and the aesthetics of Chicano literature. The volume as a whole aims at generating new ways of understanding what counts as culture and “theory” and who counts as a theorist. A selected and annotated bibliography of contemporary Chicano literary criticism is also included.
By recovering neglected authors and texts and introducing readers to an emergent Chicano canon, by introducing new perspectives on American literary history, ethnicity, gender, culture, and the literary process itself, Criticism in the Borderlands is an agenda-setting collection that moves beyond previous scholarship to open up the field of Chicano literary studies and to define anew what is American literature.

Contributors. Norma Alarcón, Héctor Calderón, Angie Chabram, Barbara Harlow, Rolando Hinojosa, Luis Leal, José E. Limón, Terese McKenna, Elizabeth J. Ordóñez, Genero Padilla, Alvina E. Quintana, Renato Rosaldo, José David Saldívar, Sonia Saldívar-Hull, Rosaura Sánchez, Roberto Trujillo

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Criticism Without Authority
Gene Swenson's and Jill Johnston’s Queer Practices
Jennifer Sichel
University of Chicago Press, 2025
A reframing of the history of 1960s New York avant-garde art centered on the queer, genre-bending criticism of Gene Swenson and Jill Johnston.
 
In the early 1960s, Gene Swenson and Jill Johnston began to imagine art criticism as something unruly and expansive, rejecting modernist appeals to purity and coherence that had overtaken the field. These critics were deeply enmeshed in New York’s avant-garde art scene, and both were explicitly and unapologetically queer. First working independently of one another, then later in dialogue, Swenson and Johnston demanded criticism become life-sustaining, subverting protocols and distorting its form beyond recognition. They utilized criticism as a means of navigating queer existence and reclaimed terms like lesbian, homosexual, mad, and psychotic as their own.
 
Jennifer Sichel follows the intertwined paths of Swenson and Johnston, providing a history of queer practices that were central to the development of avant-garde art but have been largely overlooked. Criticism Without Authority makes their work visible not just as criticism, but as its own form of art. As Sichel shows, Swenson's and Johnston’s practices, bucking categories and disciplinary formations, resist historical streamlining and stand as a key for unlocking the queerness of postwar art history.
 
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Critics and Commentators
The Book of Poems as Classic and Literature
Bruce Rusk
Harvard University Press, 2012

At once a revered canon associated with Confucius and the earliest anthology of poetry, the Book of Poems holds a unique place in Chinese literary history. Since early imperial times it served as an ideal of literary perfection, as it provided a basis for defining shi poetry, the most esteemed genre of elite composition. In imperial China, however, literary criticism and classical learning represented distinct fields of inquiry that differed in status, with classical learning considered more serious and prestigious. Literary critics thus highlighted connections between the Book of Poems and later verse, while classical scholars obscured the origins of their ideas in literary theory.

This book explores the mutual influence of literary and classicizing approaches, which frequently and fruitfully borrowed from one another. Drawing on a wide range of sources including commentaries, anthologies, colophons, and inscriptions, Bruce Rusk chronicles how scholars borrowed from critics without attribution and even resorted to forgery to make appealing new ideas look old. By unraveling the relationships through which classical and literary scholarship on the Book of Poems co-evolved from the Han dynasty through the Qing, this study shows that the ancient classic was the catalyst for intellectual innovation and literary invention.

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The Critics and the Prioress
Antisemitism, Criticism, and Chaucer's Prioress's Tale
Heather Blurton and Hannah Johnson
University of Michigan Press, 2017
Of all the Canterbury Tales, Geoffrey Chaucer’s Prioress’s Tale, in which a young schoolboy is murdered by Jews for singing a song in praise of the Virgin Mary, poses a problem to contemporary readers because of the antisemitism of the story it tells. Both the Tale’s antisemitism and its “Chaucerianism”—its fitness or aptness as part of the Chaucerian canon—are significant topics of reflection for modern readers, who worry about the Tale’s ethical implications as well as Chaucer’s own implications. Over the past fifty years, scholars have asked: Is the antisemitism in the tale that of the Prioress? Or of Chaucer the pilgrim? Or of Chaucer the author? Or, indeed, whether one ought to discuss antisemitism in the Prioress’s Tale at all, considering the potential anachronism of expecting medieval texts to conform to contemporary ideologies.

The Critics and the Prioress responds to a critical stalemate between the demands of ethics and the entailments of methodology. The book addresses key moments in criticism of the Prioress’s Tale—particularly those that stage an encounter between historicism and ethics—in order to interrogate these critical impasses while suggesting new modes for future encounters. It is an effort to identify, engage, and reframe some significant—and perennially repeated—arguments staked out in this criticism, such as the roles of gender, aesthetics, source studies, and the appropriate relationship between ethics and historicism.

The Critics and the Prioress will be an essential resource for Chaucer scholars researching as well as teaching the Prioress’s Tale. Scholars and students of Middle English literature and medieval culture more generally will also be interested in this book’s rigorous analysis of contemporary scholarly approaches to expressions of antisemitism in Chaucer’s England.

 
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A Critic's Journey
Ilan Stavans
University of Michigan Press, 2009

Ilan Stavans has been a lightning rod for cultural discussion and criticism his entire career. In A Critic's Journey, he takes on his own Jewish and Hispanic upbringing with an autobiographical focus and his typical flair with words, exploring the relationship between the two cultures from his own and also from others' experiences.

Stavans has been hailed as a voice for Latino culture thanks to his Hispanic upbringing, but as a Jew and a Caucasian, he's also an outsider to that culture---something that's sharpened his perspective (and some of his critics' swords). In this book of essays, he looks at the creative process from that point of view, exploring everything from the translation of Don Quixote to the Hispanic anti-Semitism and the Holocaust in Latin America.

Ilan Stavans is Lewis-Sebring Professor in Latin American and Latino Culture and Five College Fortieth Anniversary Professor at Amherst College. A native of Mexico, he received his doctorate in Latin American Literature from Columbia University. Stavans's books include The Hispanic Condition, On Borrowed Words, Spanglish, Dictionary Days, The Disappearance, Love & Language (with Verónica Albin), Resurrecting Hebrew, and Mr. Spic Goes to Washington, and he has edited books including The Oxford Book of Jewish Stories and the upcoming Norton Anthology of Latino Literature. His story "Morirse está en Hebreo" was made into the award-winning movie My Mexican Shivah.

Stavans has received numerous awards, among them a Guggenheim Fellowship, the National Jewish Book Award, an Emmy nomination, the Latino Book Award, Chile's Presidential Medal, the Rubén Darío Distinction, and the Cátedra Roberto Bolaño. His work has been translated into a dozen languages.

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Critics of Consciousness
The Existential Structures of Literature
Sarah N. Lawall
Harvard University Press

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Critique and Cosmos
After Misao Miyoshi
Rob Wilson and Paul A. Bové, special issue editors
Duke University Press
This special issue aims to channel the energies, tactics, critical forces, and comparative poetics Masao Miyoshi (1928–2009) carried out in his work from the 1970s on: coming to terms with his concept of aftering (the act of prolonging and transforming impacts across cultural, political, and disciplinary borders) and its temporal, border-crossing, translational, field-reframing, and revisionary effects. Contributors do not assess his scholarship and photography in any memorial, critical, or honorific sense. Instead, they seek to renew the critical visions that he distributed across various fields, from Asian to Asian American studies and beyond. Each takes seriously the mandate inside Miyoshi's work that cultural criticism envision its work broadly and courageously. Essays address the state of Japan studies; China's role in twentieth-century geopolitics, particularly involving Tibet; the critical ethos of "the planetary" in the Anthropocene; and the Korean film Snowpiercer, whose plot represents an embodiment of killer capitalism.

Contributors. Tsering Wangmo Dhompa, Arif Dirlik, Harry Harootunian, Reginald Jackson, Mary Layoun, Christine L. Marran, George Solt, Keijiro Suga, Stefan Tanaka, Chih-ming Wang, Rob Wilson
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Critique and Postcritique
Elizabeth S. Anker and Rita Felski, editors
Duke University Press, 2017
Now that literary critique's intellectual and political pay-off is no longer quite so self-evident, critics are vigorously debating the functions and futures of critique. The contributors to Critique and Postcritique join this conversation, evaluating critique's structural, methodological, and political potentials and limitations. Following the interventions made by Bruno Latour, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Sharon Marcus and Stephen Best, and others, the contributors assess the merits of the postcritical turn while exploring a range of alternate methods and critical orientations. Among other topics, the contributors challenge the distinction between surface and deep reading; outline how critique-based theory has shaped the development of the novel; examine Donna Haraway's feminist epistemology and objectivity; advocate for a "hopeful" critical disposition; highlight the difference between reading as method and critique as genre; and question critique's efficacy at attending to the affective dimensions of experience. In these and other essays this volume outlines the state of contemporary literary criticism while pointing to new ways of conducting scholarship that are better suited to the intellectual and political challenges of the present. 

Contributors: Elizabeth S. Anker, Christopher Castiglia, Russ Castronovo, Simon During, Rita Felski, Jennifer L. Fleissner, Eric Hayot, Heather Love, John Michael, Toril Moi, Ellen Rooney, C. Namwali Serpell
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Critique and the Digital
Edited by Erich Hörl, Nelly Y. Pinkrah, and Lotte Warnsholdt
Diaphanes, 2020
Erich Hörl, Nelly Y. Pinkrah, and Lotte Warnsholdt gather diverse perspectives on one agreed-upon condition: that the computational power of today’s world has fundamentally transformed all aspects of it. The contributors investigate and question not only the possible sites of critique but also of the concept of critique. If there used to be a critical subject constituted in the cultural techniques of modernity, and if digitality indicates itself as a product of modernity while at the same time somehow being its very ending, what are the ramifications? Digitality severely alters the critical subject and its spatio-temporal relations, and it therefore interferes with its potential to be a critical subject. The contributors of this volume ask what critique in the digital age might look like and offer specific examples of critique and critical practices.
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A Critique of Adjudication
fin de siècle
Duncan Kennedy
Harvard University Press, 1997

A major statement from one of the foremost legal theorists of our day, this book offers a penetrating look into the political nature of legal, and especially judicial, decision making. It is also the first sustained attempt to integrate the American approach to law, an uneasy balance of deep commitment and intense skepticism, with the Continental tradition in social theory, philosophy, and psychology.

At the center of this work is the question of how politics affects judicial activity-and how, in turn, lawmaking by judges affects American politics. Duncan Kennedy considers opposing views about whether law is political in character and, if so, how. He puts forward an original, distinctive, and remarkably lucid theory of adjudication that includes accounts of both judicial rhetoric and the experience of judging. With an eye to the current state of theory, legal or otherwise, he also includes a provocative discussion of postmodernism.

Ultimately concerned with the practical consequences of ideas about the law, A Critique of Adjudication explores the aspects and implications of adjudication as few books have in this century. As a comprehensive and powerfully argued statement of a critical position in modern American legal thought, it will be essential to any balanced picture of the legal, political, and cultural life of our nation.

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Critique Of Applied Ethics
Reflections and Recommendations
Abraham Edel
Temple University Press, 1994
"Part One is historically rich and analytically sophisticated. It is unquestionably the best treatment of the applied ethics landscape. In Part Two, the authors have an uncanny sense of the issues and a remarkable ability to demythologize the jargon temple of doom, such that controversial philosophical positions are rendered clear.... I look forward to teaching from this book." --John J. McDermott, Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and Humanities, Professor and Head of Humanities in Medicine, Texas A&M University Over the past two decades, applied ethics has turned increasingly toward theories that explore ethical questions faced by a variety of professions and away from classic moral concerns. Abraham Edel, Elizabeth Flower, and Finbarr O'Connor utilize examples of professional, public policy, and personal decision making to illustrate the strengths and limitations of the application of ethics in a rapidly changing world. They first discuss the emergence of applied ethics and how it functions within a philosophical tradition. They are not concerned, however, with solving the problems they expose, but with employing them as a means to critique applied ethics. Using human rights and health and welfare issues, the authors examine the subsequent ethical stumbling blocks that surround the "moral order" of these social concerns. Through a historical discussion of the abundant ethical theories posited since the Enlightenment, they suggest ways to decide which can serve as intellectual tools for applied ethics and consider how knowledge and experience enter into any moral decision. Turning to the factors pertinent in the analysis and solution of moral problems, they dissect the underlying influences on the practice of ethics, the way in which a moral problem is diagnosed and its relevant contexts established, the ensuing conflicts between the concerns of the individual and of society, and the degree of inventiveness in issues of morality. The authors suggest that, instead of viewing theory as a set consequence derived from prior applications, relating theory to practice will engage a process of mutual aid, from which each element will learn, refining and improving the other.
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Critique of Black Reason
Achille Mbembe
Duke University Press, 2017
In Critique of Black Reason eminent critic Achille Mbembe offers a capacious genealogy of the category of Blackness—from the Atlantic slave trade to the present—to critically reevaluate history, racism, and the future of humanity. Mbembe teases out the intellectual consequences of the reality that Europe is no longer the world's center of gravity while mapping the relations among colonialism, slavery, and contemporary financial and extractive capital. Tracing the conjunction of Blackness with the biological fiction of race, he theorizes Black reason as the collection of discourses and practices that equated Blackness with the nonhuman in order to uphold forms of oppression. Mbembe powerfully argues that this equation of Blackness with the nonhuman will serve as the template for all new forms of exclusion. With Critique of Black Reason, Mbembe offers nothing less than a map of the world as it has been constituted through colonialism and racial thinking while providing the first glimpses of a more just future. 
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Critique Of Cynical Reason
Peter Sloterdijk
University of Minnesota Press, 1988

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Critique of Exotica
Music, Politics and the Culture Industry
John Hutnyk
Pluto Press, 2000

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Critique of Forms of Life
Rahel Jaeggi
Harvard University Press, 2018

For many liberals, the question “Do others live rightly?” feels inappropriate. Liberalism seems to demand a follow-up question: “Who am I to judge?” Peaceful coexistence, in this view, is predicated on restraint from morally evaluating our peers. But Rahel Jaeggi sees the situation differently. Criticizing is not only valid but also useful, she argues. Moral judgment is no error; the error lies in how we go about judging.

One way to judge is external, based on universal standards derived from ideas about God or human nature. The other is internal, relying on standards peculiar to a given society. Both approaches have serious flaws and detractors. In Critique of Forms of Life, Jaeggi offers a third way, which she calls “immanent” critique. Inspired by Hegelian social philosophy and engaged with Anglo-American theorists such as John Dewey, Michael Walzer, and Alasdair MacIntyre, immanent critique begins with the recognition that ways of life are inherently normative because they assert their own goodness and rightness. They also have a consistent purpose: to solve basic social problems and advance social goods, most of which are common across cultures. Jaeggi argues that we can judge the validity of a society’s moral claims by evaluating how well the society adapts to crisis—whether it is able to overcome contradictions that arise from within and continue to fulfill its purpose.

Jaeggi enlivens her ideas through concrete, contemporary examples. Against both relativistic and absolutist accounts, she shows that rational social critique is possible.

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Critique of Freedom
The Central Problem of Modernity
Otfried Höffe
University of Chicago Press, 2020
In this ambitious book, philosopher Otfried Höffe provides a sophisticated account of the principle of freedom and its role in the project of modernity. Höffe addresses a set of complex questions concerning the possibility of political justice and equity in the modern world, the destruction of nature, the dissolving of social cohesion, and the deregulation of uncontrollable markets. Through these considerations, he shows how the idea of freedom is central to modernity, and he assesses freedom’s influence in a number of cultural dimensions, including the natural, economic and social, artistic and scientific, political, ethical, and personal-metaphysical.

Neither rejecting nor defending freedom and modernity, he instead explores both from a Kantian point of view, looking closely at the facets of freedom’s role and the fundamental position it has taken at the heart of modern life. Expanding beyond traditional philosophy, Critique of Freedom develops the building blocks of a critical theory of technology, environmental protection, economics, politics, medicine, and education. With a sophisticated yet straightforward style, Höffe draws on a range of disciplines in order to clearly distinguish and appreciate the many meanings of freedom and the indispensable role they play in liberal society.
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A Critique of Political Science
A History of the Caucus for a New Political Science
Clyde W. Barrow
University of Michigan Press, 2026
The Caucus for a New Political Science (CNPS) was created in 1967, when several hundred dissident political scientists walked out of the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association (APSA) to protest the Association’s refusal to take an official position against the Vietnam War. The CNPS soon expanded its mission to challenge the APSA’s behavioral and pluralist orthodoxy, protest a lack of democratic procedure and transparency in the organization, and oppose ties between the leadership and government agencies involved in covert activities. It remains unique among the more than 50 Organized Sections of APSA as the only section that defines itself ideologically and politically, rather than by research topic, methodology, subfield, or identity status.

A Critique of Political Science distinguishes between the discipline of political science (methods and concepts) and the profession of political science (persons and institutions) to move disciplinary history beyond its current form as intellectual history toward a politics of political science. The book argues that understanding the development of a discipline requires the same type of theoretical analysis that political scientists apply to other political institutions. By examining universities and professional associations as political institutions, this approach puts political struggles and ideological conflict at the very core of disciplinary history. In reviewing 50 years of debate, controversy, and in-fighting in the political science profession, the book serves as a critique of the profession and the discipline of political science, which remains woefully disengaged from the concerns of ordinary citizens, particularly the working class and the poor throughout the world.
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A Critique of Postcolonial Reason
Toward a History of the Vanishing Present
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
Harvard University Press, 1999

Are the “culture wars” over? When did they begin? What is their relationship to gender struggle and the dynamics of class? In her first full treatment of postcolonial studies, a field that she helped define, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, one of the world’s foremost literary theorists, poses these questions from within the postcolonial enclave.

“We cannot merely continue to act out the part of Caliban,” Spivak writes; and her book is an attempt to understand and describe a more responsible role for the postcolonial critic. A Critique of Postcolonial Reason tracks the figure of the “native informant” through various cultural practices—philosophy, history, literature—to suggest that it emerges as the metropolitan hybrid. The book addresses feminists, philosophers, critics, and interventionist intellectuals, as they unite and divide. It ranges from Kant’s analytic of the sublime to child labor in Bangladesh. Throughout, the notion of a Third World interloper as the pure victim of a colonialist oppressor emerges as sharply suspect: the mud we sling at certain seemingly overbearing ancestors such as Marx and Kant may be the very ground we stand on.

A major critical work, Spivak’s book redefines and repositions the postcolonial critic, leading her through transnational cultural studies into considerations of globality.

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The Critique of Pure Modernity
Hegel, Heidegger, and After
David Kolb
University of Chicago Press, 1986
"Modernity" is a troubling concept, not only for scholars but for the general public, for it seems to represent a choice between oppressive traditions and empty, rootless freedom. Seeking a broader understanding of modernity, Kolb first considers the views of Weber and then discusses in detail the pivotal writings of Hegel and Heidegger. He uses the novel strategy of presenting Heidegger's critique of Hegel and then suggesting the critique of Heidegger that Hegel might have made.

Kolb offers his own views, proposing the possibility of a meaningful life that is free but still rooted in shared contexts. He concludes with comments on "postmodernity" as discussed by Lyotard and others, arguing persuasively against the presupposition of a unified Modern or Postmodern Age.
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The Critique of Scientific Reason
Kurt Hübner
University of Chicago Press, 1983
A systematic critique of the notion that natural science is the sovereign domain of truth, Critique of Scientific Reason uses an extensive and detailed investigation of physics—and in particular of Einstein's theory of relativity—to argue that the positivistic notion of rationality is not only wrongheaded but false. Kurt Hübner contends that positivism ignores both the historical dimension of science and the basic structures common to scientific theory, myth, and so-called subjective symbolic systems. Moreover, Hübner argues, positivism has led in our time to a widespread disillusionment with science and technology.
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