Extreme inequalities in income,wealth and power lie behind Thailand’s political turmoil. What are the sources of this inequality?  Why does it persist, or even increase when the economy grows? How can it be addressed?


         The contributors to this important study—Thai scholars, reformers and civil servants—shed light on the many dimensions of inequality in Thailand, looking beyond simple income measures to consider land ownership, education, finance, business structures and politics. The contributors propose a series of reforms in taxation, spending and institutional reform that can address growing inequality.


        Inequality is among the biggest threats to social stability in Southeast Asia, and this close study of a key Southeast Asian country will be relevant to regional policy-makers, economists and business decision-makers, as well as students of oligarchy and inequality more generally.  

“A wonderfully rich and insightful collection of well-integrated essays on important current thinkers and social movements.” -Martin Jay
University of California, Berkeley

Unruly Practices brings together a series of widely discussed essays in feminism and social theory.  Read together, they constitute a sustained critical encounter with leading European and American approaches to social theory.  In addition, Nancy Fraser develops a new and original socialist-feminist critical theory that overcomes many of the limitations of current alternatives.  First, in a series of critical essays, she deploys philosophical and literary techniques to sort the wheat from the chaff in the work of Michel Foucault, the French deconstructionists, Richard Rorty, and Jurgen Habermas.  Then, in a group of constructive essays, she incorporates their respective strengths in a new critical theory of late-capitalist political culture.

Fraser breaks new ground methodologically by integrating the previously divergent insights of poststructuralism, critical social theory, feminist theory, and pragmatism.  Thematically, she deals with varied forms of dominance and subordination in modern, industrial, late-capitalist societies - especially gender dominance and subordination; state-bureaucratic forms of organization; the institutional politics of knowledge and expertise; and the structure and function of social-welfare programs.  In the last section of the book, these themes are integrated in an original theory of “the politics of need interpretation.”  This concept becomes the linchpin of he socialist-feminist critical theory proposed in the last chapter.

Henry David Thoreau’s interest in Native Americans is widely known and a recurring topic of scholarly attention, yet it is also a source of debate. This is a figure who both had a deep interest in Native American history and culture and was seen by many of his contemporaries, including Ralph Waldo Emerson and Nathaniel Hawthorne, as “more like an Indian” than his white neighbors. At the same time, Thoreau did little to protest the systematic dispossession of Indigenous people across the country in his lifetime. John J. Kucich charges into this contradiction, considering how Thoreau could demonstrate respect for Native American beliefs on one hand and ignore the genocide of this group, actively happening throughout his life, on the other. Thoreau’s long study of Native peoples, as reflected in so much of his writing, allowed him to glimpse an Indigenous worldview, but it never fully freed him from the blind spots of settler colonialism.

Drawing on Indigenous studies and critiques of settler colonialism, as well as new materialist approaches that illustrate Thoreau’s radical reimagining of the relationship between humans and the natural world, Unsettling Thoreau explores the stakes of Thoreau’s effort to live mindfully and ethically in place when living alongside, or replacing marginalized peoples. By examining the vast sweep of his writings, including the unpublished Indian Notebooks, and placing them alongside Native writers and communities in and beyond New England, this book gauges Thoreau’s effort to use Indigenous knowledge to reimagine a settler colonial world, without removing him from its trappings.

N. Katherine Hayles is known for breaking new ground at the intersection of the sciences and the humanities. In Unthought, she once again bridges disciplines by revealing how we think without thinking—how we use cognitive processes that are inaccessible to consciousness yet necessary for it to function.

Marshalling fresh insights from neuroscience, cognitive science, cognitive biology, and literature, Hayles expands our understanding of cognition and demonstrates that it involves more than consciousness alone. Cognition, as Hayles defines it, is applicable not only to nonconscious processes in humans but to all forms of life, including unicellular organisms and plants. Startlingly, she also shows that cognition operates in the sophisticated information-processing abilities of technical systems: when humans and cognitive technical systems interact, they form “cognitive assemblages”—as found in urban traffic control, drones, and the trading algorithms of finance capital, for instance—and these assemblages are transforming life on earth. The result is what Hayles calls a “planetary cognitive ecology,” which includes both human and technical actors and which poses urgent questions to humanists and social scientists alike.

At a time when scientific and technological advances are bringing far-reaching aspects of cognition into the public eye, Unthought reflects deeply on our contemporary situation and moves us toward a more sustainable and flourishing environment for all beings.

Urban life has long intrigued Indigenous Amazonians, who regard cities as the locus of both extraordinary power and danger. Modern and ancient cities alike have thus become models for the representation of extreme alterity under the guise of supernatural enchanted cities. This volume seeks to analyze how these ambiguous urban imaginaries—complex representations that function as cognitive tools and blueprints for social action—express a singular view of cosmopolitical relations, how they inform and shape forest-city interactions, and the history of how they came into existence.

Featuring analysis from historical, ethnological, and philosophical perspectives, contributors seek to explain the imaginaries’ widespread diffusion, as well as their influence in present-day migration and urbanization. Above all, it underscores how these urban imaginaries allow Indigenous Amazonians to express their concerns about power, alterity, domination, and defiance.

Contributors
Natalia Buitron
Philippe Erikson
Emanuele Fabiano
Fabiana Maizza
Daniela Peluso
Fernando Santos-Granero
Pirjo Kristiina Virtanen
Robin M. Wright