Results by title

4917 books match the query 'Philosophy' and 256 start with c

cover of Criminals and Enemies

Criminals and Enemies

Austin Sarat

University of Massachusetts Press, 2019

Key binaries like public/private and speech/conduct are mainstays of the liberal legal system. However, the pairing of criminal/enemy has received little scholarly attention by comparison. Bringing together a group of distinguished and disciplinarily diverse scholars, Criminals and Enemies, the most recent volume in the Amherst Series in Law, Jurisprudence, and Social Thought, addresses this gap in the literature. Drawing on political philosophy, legal analysis, and historical research, this essential volume reveals just how central the criminal/enemy distinction is to the structure and practice of contemporary law.

The editors' introduction situates criminals and enemies in a theoretical context, focusing on the work of Thomas Hobbes and Carl Schmitt, while other essays consider topics ranging from Germany's denazification project to South Africa's pre- and post-apartheid legal regime to the complicating factors introduced by the war on terror. In addition to the editors, the contributors include Stephen Clingman, Jennifer Daskal, Sara Kendall, Devin Pendas, and Annette Weinke.
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Crises of the Sentence

Jan Mieszkowski

University of Chicago Press, 2019

There are few forms in which so much authority has been invested with so little reflection as the sentence. Though a fundamental unit of discourse, it has rarely been an explicit object of inquiry, often taking a back seat to concepts such as the word, trope, line, or stanza.
            To understand what is at stake in thinking—or not thinking—about the sentence, Jan Mieszkowski looks at the difficulties confronting nineteenth- and twentieth-century authors when they try to explain what a sentence is and what it can do. From Romantic debates about the power of the stand-alone sentence, to the realist obsession with precision and revision, to modernist experiments with ungovernable forms, Mieszkowski explores the hidden allegiances behind our ever-changing stylistic ideals. By showing how an investment in superior writing has always been an ethical and a political as well as an aesthetic commitment, Crises of the Sentence offers a new perspective on our love-hate relationship with this fundamental compositional category.
 
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Crisis and Conversion in Apuleius' Metamorphoses

Nancy Shumate

University of Michigan Press, 1996

Apuleius' wonderful Latin novel Metamorphoses, written in the second century C.E., was for a long time neglected. In recent years some have attempted to understand the Metamorphoses by applying contemporary critical theory to the work, without notable success. In Crisis and Conversion in Apuleius' "Metamorphoses" Nancy Shumate takes a new and profitable approach: she uses an epistemologically oriented model of religious conversion to study the experiences of the novel's central character, Lucius, who is turned into an ass and back again.
Shumate draws on a wide range of literary and nonliterary representations of conversion in order to establish a useful theoretical framework. The Metamorphoses is exposed as a text anticipating later narratives in its concern with world-building, with the narrator's subjective reality, and with the invocation and critique of religious experience.
Crisis and Conversion in Apuleius' "Metamorphoses" will be of interest to classicists and scholars of Silver Latin and of the increasingly popular ancient novel, as well as to students of psychology and the sociology of religious experience.
Nancy Shumate is Associate Professor of Classical Languages and Literatures, Smith College.
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Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology

Edmund Husserl

Northwestern University Press, 1970

The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, Husserl's last great work, is important both for its content and for the influence it has had on other philosophers. In this book, which remained unfinished at his death, Husserl attempts to forge a union between phenomenology and existentialism.

Husserl provides not only a history of philosophy but a philosophy of history. As he says in Part I, "The genuine spiritual struggles of European humanity as such take the form of struggles between the philosophies, that is, between the skeptical philosophies--or nonphilosophies, which retain the word but not the task—and the actual and still vital philosophies. But the vitality of the latter consists in the fact that they are struggling for their true and genuine meaning and thus for the meaning of a genuine humanity."
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cover of Critical Environments: Postmodern Theory and the Pragmatics of the “Outside”

Critical Environments

Postmodern Theory and the Pragmatics of the “Outside”

Cary Wolfe

University of Minnesota Press, 1998

Argues for a pragmatist orientation for postmodern theory.

Taking up the problem that has stalled contemporary theory—its treatment of the object of knowledge, the “outside,” as nothing but what a particular discourse makes of it—this book suggests a solution: a reinvigorated, posthumanist form of pragmatism.

Author Cary Wolfe investigates three of the most significant strains of postmodern theory (pragmatism, systems theory, and poststructuralism) and shows how each confronts the specter of an “outside” not wholly constituted by discourses, language games, and interpretive communities. He then assesses these confrontations in light of an essentially pragmatic view of theory, one that constantly asks what practical and material difference it makes, and to whom, how these issues are negotiated. Wolfe concludes by comparing the pragmatist view of the relation of theory to politics with important work in contemporary post-Marxism. In arguing for a pragmatist orientation for postmodern theory, Wolfe deploys continental critical theory to avoid the nativism and “American exceptionalism” that has traditionally accompanied pragmatist philosophy. Unique in its collation of major theorists rarely considered together, Critical Environments incorporates detailed discussions of the work of Richard Rorty, Walter Benn Michaels, Stanley Cavell, Humberto Maturana, Francisco Varela, Niklas Luhmann, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Fredric Jameson, and others, and ranges across fields from feminist philosophy of science to the theory of ideology. Wolfe draws on recent work in systems theory to articulate a properly postmodern pragmatism. In doing so, he offers American readers a detailed introduction to systems theory, which he situates and critiques in the broader context of philosophical pragmatism, the theory of democratic social antagonism, and materialist theories of ideology, knowledge, and power. An answer to the widespread charge of relativism leveled against postmodern theory, his work will enhance and inspire new kinds of critical thought.
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Critical Essays

Volume 2: 1949–1951

Georges Bataille

Seagull Books, 2024

An introduction for English-language readers to Georges Bataille’s postwar philosophical and critical writings.

In the aftermath of World War II, French thinker and writer Georges Bataille forged a singular path through the moral and political impasses of his age. In 1946, animated by “a need to live events in an increasingly conscious way,” and to reject any compartmentalization of intellectual life, Bataille founded the journal Critique. Continuing the publication of his postwar writings, this second book in a three-volume collection of Bataille’s work collects his essays and reviews from the years 1949 to 1951.

In this period of intellectual isolation and intense reflection, Bataille developed and refined his genealogy of morality through a sustained reflection on the fate of the sacred in the modern world. He offered a critique of the limits of existing morality, especially in its denial of excess, while sketching the lineaments of a new hyper-morality. Bataille’s wide-ranging reflections are true to the intellectual mission of Critique, which he founded as a space open to the broadest considerations of the present. As well as discussing significant figures like Samuel Beckett, André Gide, and René Char, Bataille also offers fascinating reflections on American politics, Nazism, existentialism, materialism, and play.

The connecting thread in these diverse essays remains Bataille’s concern with the extremes of human experience and the possibilities of transcending the limits of societies founded on utility and restraint. His writings remain a provocative incitement to rethink the boundaries we impose on expression and existence.
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cover of Critical Moves: Dance Studies in Theory and Politics

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.


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cover of Critical Patriots: The Contested Declaration of Independence and the Political Thought of James Fennimore Cooper, Herman Melville, and Walt Whitman

Critical Patriots

The Contested Declaration of Independence and the Political Thought of James Fennimore Cooper, Herman Melville, and Walt Whitman

John Alvis

St. Augustine's Press, 2026

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cover of Critical Practices in Post-Franco Spain

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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cover of Critical Race Theory 2Nd Ed

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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cover of Critical Race Theory: The Cutting Edge

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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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 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, 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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cover of Critical Terms for the Study of Buddhism

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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cover of Critical Theory and Performance: Revised and Enlarged Edition

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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cover of Critical Theory of Communication: New Readings of Lukács, Adorno, Marcuse, Honneth and Habermas in the Age of the Internet

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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cover of Critical Theory to Structuralism: Philosophy, Politics, and the Human Sciences

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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cover of Critique Of Cynical Reason

Critique Of Cynical Reason

Peter Sloterdijk

University of Minnesota Press, 1988

In 1983, two centuries after the publication of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, another philosophical treatise-polemical in nature, with a title that conscious and disrespectfully alludes to the earlier work —appeared in West Germany. Pete Sloterdijk's Critique of Cynical Reason stirred both critical acclaim and consternation and attracted a wide readership, especially among those who had come of age in the 1960s. Sloterdijk finds cynicism the dominant mode in contemporary culture in personal and institutional settings; his book is less a history of the impulse than. an investigation of its role in the postmodern 1970s and 1980s, among those whose earlier hopes for social change had crumbled and faded away. Sloterdijk thus brings into cultural and political discourse an issue which, though central to the mood of a generation, has remained submerged throughout the current debate about modernity and postmodernity.

With Adorno and Horkeimer's Dialectic of Enlightenment as his primary jumping-off point, Sloterdijk also draws upon, and contends with, the poststructuralist concepts of Deleuze and Guattari. He defines cynicism as enlightened false consciousness—a sensibility "well off and miserable at the same time," able to function in the workaday world yet assailed by doubt and paralysis; and, as counterstrategy, proposes the kynicism of antiquity—the sensuality and loud, satiric laughter of Diogenes. Above all, Sloterdijk is determined to resist the amnesia inherent in cynicism. The twentieth-century German historical experience lies behind his work, which closes with a brilliant essay on the Weimar Republic —the fourteen years between a lost war and Hitler's ascent to power, and a time when the cynical mode first achieved cultural dominance.

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cover of Critique and the Digital

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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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 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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Critique

The Stakes of Form

Edited by Sami Khatib, Holger Kuhn, Oona Lochner, Isabel Mehl, and Beate Söntgen

Diaphanes, 2020

Critique is a form of thinking and acting. Since the end of the 18th century, there has been a dynamization and fluidization of the understanding of form, as concepts such as the break, marginalization, tearing, and opening indicate. As a philosophical problem, the question of form arises in critical theory from Marx to Adorno. Since the 1960s, literary practices have proliferated that generate critical statements less through traditional argument and more through the programmatic use of formal means. At the same time, the writing self, along with its attitudes, reflections, affects, and instruments, visibly enters the critical scene. This volume examines how the interdependence of critique, object, and form translates into critical stances, understood as learnable, reproducible gestures, which bear witness to changing conditions and media of critical practice.
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Cross-Level Inference

Christopher H. Achen and W. Phillips Shively

University of Chicago Press, 1995

In the last several years, new disputes have erupted over the use of group averages from census areas or voting districts to draw inferences about individual social behavior. Social scientists, policy analysts, and historians often have little choice about using this kind of data, but statistical analysis of them is fraught with pitfalls. The recent debates have led to a new menu of choices for the applied researcher. This volume explains why older methods like ecological regression so often fail, and it gives the most comprehensive treatment available of the promising new techniques for cross-level inference.

Experts in statistical analysis of aggregate data, Christopher H. Achen and W. Philips Shively contend that cross-level inference makes unusually strong demands on substantive knowledge, so that no one method, such as Goodman's ecological regression, will fit all situations. Criticizing Goodman's model and some recent attempts to replace it, the authors argue for a range of alternate techniques, including estensions of cross-tabular, regression analysis, and unobservable variable estimators.
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Crossing the Postmodern Divide

Albert Borgmann

University of Chicago Press, 1993

In this eloquent guide to the meanings of the postmodern era, Albert Borgmann charts the options before us as we seek alternatives to the joyless and artificial culture of consumption. Borgmann connects the fundamental ideas driving his understanding of society's ills to every sphere of contemporary social life, and goes beyond the language of postmodern discourse to offer a powerfully articulated vision of what this new era, at its best, has in store.

"[This] thoughtful book is the first remotely realistic map out of the post modern labyrinth."—Joseph Coates, The Chicago Tribune

"Rather astoundingly large-minded vision of the nature of humanity, civilization and science."—Kirkus Reviews
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cover of Crossings: Nietzsche and the Space of Tragedy

Crossings

Nietzsche and the Space of Tragedy

John Sallis

University of Chicago Press, 1991

Boldly contesting recent scholarship, Sallis argues that
The Birth of Tragedy is a rethinking of art at the
limit of metaphysics. His close reading focuses on the
complexity of the Apollinian/Dionysian dyad and on the
crossing of these basic art impulses in tragedy.

"Sallis effectively calls into question some commonly
accepted and simplistic ideas about Nietzsche's early
thinking and its debt to Schopenhauer, and proposes
alternatives that are worth considering."—Richard
Schacht, Times Literary Supplement
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cover of Crossroads, Directions and A New Critical Race Theory

Crossroads, Directions and A New Critical Race Theory

edited by Francisco Valdes, Jerome McCristal Culp and Angela P. Harris

Temple University Press, 2002

Its opponents call it part of "the lunatic fringe," a justification for "black separateness," "the most embarrassing trend in American publishing." "It" is Critical Race Theory.

But what is Critical Race Theory? How did it develop? Where does it stand now? Where should it go in the future? In this volume, thirty-one CRT scholars present their views on the ideas and methods of CRT, its role in academia and in the culture at large, and its past, present, and future.

Critical race theorists assert that both the procedures and the substance of American law are structured to maintain white privilege. The neutrality and objectivity of the law are not just unattainable ideals; they are harmful actions that obscure the law's role in protecting white supremacy. This notion—so obvious to some, so unthinkable to others—has stimulated and divided legal thinking in this country and, increasingly, abroad.

The essays in Crossroads, Directions, and a New Critical Race Theory—all original—address this notion in a variety of helpful and exciting ways. They use analysis, personal experience, historical narrative, and many other techniques to explain the importance of looking critically at how race permeates our national consciousness.
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cover of Crédit et débit

Crédit et débit

Alexander Kluge and Joseph Vogl

Diaphanes, 2013

Les chaînes privées allemandes ne sont pas vraiment réputées pour le niveau élevé des débats qu’elles diffusent; la surprise est d’autant plus grande pour le zappeur qui, aux alentours de minuit, tombe sur ce genre de phrases : « La superstition économique est un peu comme l’éventail des vertus bourgeoises » ou « Les solutions se trouvent toujours dans la rue, dans le trafic. » Aucun doute : il s’agit d’une des émissions culturelles les plus remarquables – au sens plein du mot – d’Alexander Kluge. Kluge a trouvé en Joseph Vogl un partenaire idéal pour sa technique d’interview si caractéristique. Le résultat de cette passion commune, ce sont plus de 40 interviews télévisuelles qui renouvellent le genre en profondeur. La digression, maniée avec un talent particulier, n’y est jamais gratuite.
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cover of Cultural Boundaries of Science: Credibility on the Line

Cultural Boundaries of Science

Credibility on the Line

Thomas F. Gieryn

University of Chicago Press, 1998

Why is science so credible? Usual answers center on scientists' objective methods or their powerful instruments. In his new book, Thomas Gieryn argues that a better explanation for the cultural authority of science lies downstream, when scientific claims leave laboratories and enter courtrooms, boardrooms, and living rooms. On such occasions, we use "maps" to decide who to believe—cultural maps demarcating "science" from pseudoscience, ideology, faith, or nonsense.

Gieryn looks at episodes of boundary-work: Was phrenology good science? How about cold fusion? Is social science really scientific? Is organic farming? After centuries of disputes like these, Gieryn finds no stable criteria that absolutely distinguish science from non-science. Science remains a pliable cultural space, flexibly reshaped to claim credibility for some beliefs while denying it to others. In a timely epilogue, Gieryn finds this same controversy at the heart of the raging "science wars."




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cover of Cultural Compass

Cultural Compass

Martin Manalansan

Temple University Press, 2000

Cultural Compass re-writes the space of Asian Americans. Through innovative studies of community politics, gender, family and sexual relations, cultural events, and other sites central to the formation of ethnic and citizen identity, contributors reconfigure ethnography according to Asian American experiences in the United States. In these eleven essays, scholars in anthropology, sociology, ethnic studies, and Asian American studies reconsider traditional models for ethnographic research.

Drawing upon recent theoretical discussions and methodological innovations, the contributors explore the construction and displacement of self, community, and  home integral to Asian American cultural journeys in the late twentieth century. Some discuss the  unique situation of doing ethnographic work "at home" -- that is researching one's own ethnic group or another group with Asian America. Others draw on rich and diverse field experiences. Whether they are doing homework or fieldwork, contributors reflect on the ways that particular matters of identity -- gender, class, sexuality, ethnicity, age -- play out between researchers and informants. Individual essays and the book as a whole challenge the notion of a monolithic, spatially bounded Asian American community, pointing the way to multiple sites of political struggle, cultural critique, and social change.
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cover of Cultural Conservatism, Political Liberalism: From Criticism to Cultural Studies

Cultural Conservatism, Political Liberalism

From Criticism to Cultural Studies

James Seaton

University of Michigan Press, 1996

Cultural Conservatism, Political Liberalism is an impassioned response to the debates on culture and the literary canon over the last decade. James Seaton argues that the attempts of E. D. Hirsch and Allan Bloom to unite cultural conservatism with political liberalism have been inadequate. He believes that their fullest integration is found not in a doctrine, but in a tradition, the tradition of cultural critics from Mencken through Ellison.
Chapters on Lionel Trilling, H. L. Mencken and Irving Babbitt, Ralph Ellison, Dwight Macdonald, Diana Trilling, and Edmund Wilson affirm the continuing pertinence of their work to today's concerns. Seaton then turns to the careers of Leslie Fiedler and Susan Sontag to explore the impact of the cultural radicalism of the sixties on literary criticism. Subsequent chapters analyze the successes and failures of contemporary cultural studies through the writings of Richard Rorty, Edward Said, Stanley Fish and Fredric Jameson.
Separately, these chapters provide provocative readings of the individual critics; together they make a case for the tradition exemplified by these critics as an alternative to contemporary cultural studies. The issues the book discusses extend beyond literary criticism and the academic world to the political-religious- cultural conflicts of today's culture wars.
"These lively, closely argued essays explain very clearly what the issues are, how they arose, and why they are important." --Christopher Lasch
"A forceful argument about the relationship between literary studies and politics that will add something important to the vigorous, and often fierce, discussion of the canon, the politics of literature, and educational reform."--William Cain, Wellesley College
James Seaton is Professor of English, Michigan State University. He is co-editor, with William K. Buckley, of Beyond Cheering and Bashing: New Perspectives on the Closing of the American Mind.
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Cultural Disjunctions

Post-Traditional Jewish Identities

Paul Mendes-Flohr

University of Chicago Press, 2021

The identity of contemporary Jews is multifaceted, no longer necessarily defined by an observance of the Torah and God’s commandments. Indeed, the Jews of modernity are no longer exclusively Jewish. They are affiliated with a host of complementary and sometimes clashing communities—vocational, professional, political, and cultural—whose interests may not coincide with that of the community of their birth and inherited culture. In Cultural Disjunctions, Paul Mendes-Flohr explores the possibility of a spiritually and intellectually engaged cosmopolitan Jewish identity for our time. Reflecting on the need to participate in the spiritual life of Judaism so that it enables multiple relations beyond its borders and allows one to balance Jewish commitment with a genuine obligation to the universal, Mendes-Flohr lays out what this delicate balance can look like for contemporary Jews, both in Israel and in diasporic communities worldwide. Cultural Disjunctions walks us through the labyrinth of twentieth-century Jewish cultural identities and commitments. Ultimately, Mendes-Flohr calls for Jews to remain “discontent,” not just with themselves but also and especially with the reigning social and political order, and to fight for its betterment. 
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cover of Cultural Forests of the Amazon: A Historical Ecology of People and Their Landscapes

Cultural Forests of the Amazon

A Historical Ecology of People and Their Landscapes

William Balee

University of Alabama Press, 2013

Winner of the Society for Economic Botany's Mary W. Klinger Book Award.

Cultural Forests of the Amazon is a comprehensive and diverse account of how indigenous people transformed landscapes and managed resources in the most extensive region of tropical forests in the world.
 
Until recently, most scholars and scientists, as well as the general public, thought indigenous people had a minimal impact on Amazon forests, once considered to be total wildernesses. William Balée’s research, conducted over a span of three decades, shows a more complicated truth. In Cultural Forests of the Amazon, he argues that indigenous people, past and present, have time and time again profoundly transformed nature into culture. Moreover, they have done so using their traditional knowledge and technology developed over thousands of years. Balée demonstrates the inestimable value of indigenous knowledge in providing guideposts for a potentially less destructive future for environments and biota in the Amazon. He shows that we can no longer think about species and landscape diversity in any tropical forest without taking into account the intricacies of human history and the impact of all forms of knowledge and technology.
 
Balée describes the development of his historical ecology approach in Amazonia, along with important material on little-known forest dwellers and their habitats, current thinking in Amazonian historical ecology, and a narrative of his own dialogue with the Amazon and its people.

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Cultural Graphology

Writing after Derrida

Juliet Fleming

University of Chicago Press, 2016

“Cultural Graphology” could be the name of a new human science: this was Derrida’s speculation when, in the late 1960s, he imagined a discipline that combined psychoanalysis, deconstruction, and a commitment to the topic of writing. He never undertook the project himself but did leave two brief sketches of how he thought cultural graphology might proceed. In this book, Juliet Fleming picks up where Derrida left off. Using both his early and later thought, and the psychoanalytic texts to which it is addressed, to examine the print culture of early modern England, she drastically unsettles some key assumptions of book history.

Fleming shows that the single most important lesson to survive from Derrida’s early work is that we do not know what writing is. Channeling Derrida’s thought into places it has not been seen before, she examines printed errors, spaces, and ornaments (topics that have hitherto been marginal to our accounts of print culture) and excavates the long-forgotten reading practice of cutting printed books. Proposing radical deformations to the meanings of fundamental and apparently simple terms such as “error,” “letter,” “surface,” and “cut,” Fleming opens up exciting new pathways into our understanding of writing all told.
 
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Cultural Histories of the Material World

Peter N. Miller, Editor

University of Michigan Press, 2013

All across the humanities fields there is a new interest in materials and materiality. This is the first book to capture and study the “material turn” in the humanities from all its varied perspectives. Cultural Histories of the Material World brings together top scholars from all these different fields—from Art History, Anthropology, Archaeology, Classics, Folklore, History, History of Science, Literature, Philosophy—to offer their vision of what cultural history of the material world looks like and attempt to show how attention to materiality can contribute to a more precise historical understanding of specific times, places, ways, and means. The result is a spectacular kaleidoscope of future possibilities and new perspectives.

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Cultural Literacy and the Idea of General Education

Edited by Ian Westbury and Alan C. Purves

University of Chicago Press, 1987

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Cultural Semantics

Keywords of Our Time

Martin Jay

University of Massachusetts Press, 1998

A selection of Martin Jay's recent writings on contemporary thought and culture, this is a book about ideas that matter—and about why ideas matter. Borrowing from Flaubert's notion of a dictionary of “received ideas” and Raymond Williams's explorations of the “keywords” of the modern age, Jay investigates some of the central concepts by which we currently organize our thoughts and lives. His topics range from “theory” and “experience” to the meaning of “multiculturalism” and the dynamics of cultural “subversion.” Among the thinkers he engages are Bataille and Foucault, Adorno and Lacoue-Labarthe, Walter Benjamin, Christa Wolf, and Jean-François Lyotard. 

By looking closely at what “words do and perform,” Jay makes us aware of the extent to which the language we use mediates and shapes our experience. By helping to distance us from much that we now take for granted, he makes it difficult for us to remain comfortably certain about what we think we know. 

Elegantly written and richly insightful, this is a work of cultural criticism and intellectual analysis of the first order.

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cover of Cultural Struggles: Performance, Ethnography, Praxis

Cultural Struggles

Performance, Ethnography, Praxis

Dwight Conquergood

University of Michigan Press, 2013

The late Dwight Conquergood’s research has inspired an entire generation of scholars invested in performance as a meaningful paradigm to understand human interaction, especially between structures of power and the disenfranchised. Conquergood’s research laid the groundwork for others to engage issues of ethics in ethnographic research, performance as a meaningful paradigm for ethnography, and case studies that demonstrated the dissolution of theory/practice binaries.Cultural Struggles is the first gathering of Conquergood’s work in a single volume, tracing the evolution of one scholar’s thinking across a career of scholarship, teaching, and activism, and also the first collection of its kind to bring together theory, method, and complete case studies.

The collection begins with an illuminating introduction by E. Patrick Johnson and ends with commentary by other scholars (Micaela di Leonardo, Judith Hamera, Shannon Jackson, D. Soyini Madison, Lisa Merrill, Della Pollock, and Joseph Roach), engaging aspects of Conquergood’s work and providing insight into how that work has withstood the test of time, as scholars still draw on his research to inform their current interests and methods.

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Cultural Studies 1983

A Theoretical History

Stuart Hall

Duke University Press, 2016

The publication of Cultural Studies 1983 is a touchstone event in the history of Cultural Studies and a testament to Stuart Hall's unparalleled contributions. The eight foundational lectures Hall delivered at the University of Illinois in 1983 introduced North American audiences to a thinker and discipline that would shift the course of critical scholarship. Unavailable until now, these lectures present Hall's original engagements with the theoretical positions that contributed to the formation of Cultural Studies. Throughout this personally guided tour of Cultural Studies' intellectual genealogy, Hall discusses the work of Richard Hoggart, Raymond Williams, and E. P. Thompson; the influence of structuralism; the limitations and possibilities of Marxist theory; and the importance of Althusser and Gramsci. Throughout these theoretical reflections, Hall insists that Cultural Studies aims to provide the means for political change.
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Culture and Enchantment

Mark A. Schneider

University of Chicago Press, 1993

Max Weber viewed modern life as disenchanted, an arena from which scientific inquiry had banished magic. In contrast, Mark Schneider argues intriguingly that enchantment—the sense that we are confronted by inexplicable phenomena—persists in the world today, although it has shifted from the natural to the cultural arena. Culture and Enchantment shows that students of culture today operate in social and intellectual circumstances similar to those of seventeenth-century natural philosophers. Just as Newton was drawn to alchemy, scholars today are fascinated by ghostly and mercurial agents thought to account for the meanings of cultural entities.

For interpretive disciplines, Schneider suggests, meaning often behaves behaves as mysteriously as the apparitions pursued by centuries ago by natural philosophers. He demonstrates this using two case studies from anthropology: Clifford Geertz's description of Balinese cockfights and Yoruba statuary, and Claude Levi-Strauss's analyses of myths. These provide a basis for actively engaging disputes over the meaning and interpretation of culture.

Culture and Enchantment will appeal to an interdisciplinary audience in anthropology, sociology, history, history and sociology of science, culture studies, and literary theory. Schneider's provocative arguments will make this book a fulcrum in the continuing debate over the nature and prospects of cultural inquiry.
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cover of Culture and Human Nature: Theoretical Papers of Melford E. Spiro

Culture and Human Nature

Theoretical Papers of Melford E. Spiro

Melford E. Spiro

University of Chicago Press, 1987

One of the most prominent figures in psychoanalytic and psychological anthropology, Melford E. Spiro has produced an oeuvre of broad theoretical and ethnographic scope. One of the few anthropologists who are also trained in psychoanalysis, he has made the study of culture and personality a distinctive theoretical approach to anthropological work and has been a consistent and forceful critic of such popular intellectual movements as structuralism, hermeneutics, cultural determinism, and symbolic anthropology.

This volume of Spiro's major theoretical writings concentrates on theories of culture and human nature, functional analysis, and religion. Spiro argues that important dimensions of the human family are the same everywhere and that a theory of human nature is both possible and necessary. He discusses religious beliefs, analyzing not only their structures but also the ways such beliefs are held and the meanings attributed to them. This analysis, Spiro shows, can be done most successfully by means of a theory of the human family, of infant and child development and socialization, of panhuman unconscious processes, and of universal psychodynamic constellations such as the Oedipus complex.
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Culture and Power

The Sociology of Pierre Bourdieu

David Swartz

University of Chicago Press, 1997

Pierre Bourdieu is one of the world's most important social theorists and is also one of the great empirical researchers in contemporary sociology. However, reading Bourdieu can be difficult for those not familiar with the French cultural context, and until now a comprehensive introduction to Bourdieu's oeuvre has not been available.

David Swartz focuses on a central theme in Bourdieu's work—the complex relationship between culture and power—and explains that sociology for Bourdieu is a mode of political intervention. Swartz clarifies Bourdieu's difficult concepts, noting where they have been misinterpreted by critics and where they have fallen short in resolving important analytical issues. The book also shows how Bourdieu has synthesized his theory of practices and symbolic power from Durkheim, Marx, and Weber, and how his work was influenced by Sartre, Levi-Strauss, and Althusser.

Culture and Power is the first book to offer both a sympathetic and critical examination of Bourdieu's work and it will be invaluable to social scientists as well as to a broader audience in the humanities.
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Culture and Value

Ludwig Wittgenstein

University of Chicago Press, 1980

The most wide-ranging and accessible thoughts of a philosophical genius, from his private notebooks

Throughout his life, Ludwig Wittgenstein reliably set down his thoughts in notebooks. This volume offers a selection of the most interesting and important of the remarks from those notebooks that deal with matters other than technical philosophical issues. In these pages, Wittgenstein reflects on religion, the work of philosophy, genius, music, architecture, and much more. Peter Winch's translation of Wittgenstein's remarks on culture and value presents all entries chronologically, with the German text alongside the English and a subject index for reference.
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cover of Culture and Well-Being: Anthropological Approaches to Freedom and Political Ethics

Culture and Well-Being

Anthropological Approaches to Freedom and Political Ethics

Alberto Corsin Jimenez

Pluto Press, 2008

The concept of well-being has emerged as a key category of social and political thought, especially in the fields of moral and political philosophy, development studies, and economics.



This book takes a critical look at the notion of well-being by examining what well-being means, or could mean, to people living in a number of different regions including Sudan, Nepal, Papua New Guinea, India, Sierra Leone, and the UK.



The contributors take issue with some of the assumptions behind Western concepts of well-being. They explore what characterizes a "good life" and how this idea has been affected by globalization and neoliberalism.



The book makes a major contribution to social theory by presenting new analytical models that make sense of the changing shapes of people's life and ethical values.

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Culture in the Anteroom

The Legacies of Siegfried Kracauer

Edited by Gerd Gemünden and Johannes von Moltke

University of Michigan Press, 2012

Culture in the Anteroom introduces an English-speaking readership to the full range of Siegfried Kracauer's work as novelist, architect, journalist, sociologist, historian, exile critic, and theorist of visual culture. This interdisciplinary anthology---including pieces from Miriam Bratu Hansen, Andreas Huyssen, Noah Isenberg, Lutz Koepnick, Eric Rentschler, and Heide Schlüpmann---brings together literary and film scholars, historians and art historians, sociologists, and architects to address the scope and current relevance of a body of work dedicated to investigating all aspects of modernism and modernity. The contributors approach Kracauer's writings from a variety of angles, some by placing them in dialogue with his contemporaries in Weimar Germany and the New York Intellectuals of the 1940s and '50s; others by exploring relatively unknown facets of Kracauer's oeuvre by considering his contributions to architectural history, the history of radio as well as other new media, and museum and exhibition culture.

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cover of Culture, Power, Place: Explorations in Critical Anthropology

Culture, Power, Place

Explorations in Critical Anthropology

Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson, eds.

Duke University Press, 1997

Anthropology has traditionally relied on a spatially localized society or culture as its object of study. The essays in Culture, Power, Place demonstrate how in recent years this anthropological convention and its attendant assumptions about identity and cultural difference have undergone a series of important challenges. In light of increasing mass migration and the transnational cultural flows of a late capitalist, postcolonial world, the contributors to this volume examine shifts in anthropological thought regarding issues of identity, place, power, and resistance.
This collection of both new and well-known essays begins by critically exploring the concepts of locality and community; first, as they have had an impact on contemporary global understandings of displacement and mobility, and, second, as they have had a part in defining identity and subjectivity itself. With sites of discussion ranging from a democratic Spain to a Puerto Rican barrio in North Philadelphia, from Burundian Hutu refugees in Tanzania to Asian landscapes in rural California, from the silk factories of Hangzhou to the long-sought-after home of the Palestinians, these essays examine the interplay between changing schemes of categorization and the discourses of difference on which these concepts are based. The effect of the placeless mass media on our understanding of place—and the forces that make certain identities viable in the world and others not—are also discussed, as are the intertwining of place-making, identity, and resistance as they interact with the meaning and consumption of signs. Finally, this volume offers a self-reflective look at the social and political location of anthropologists in relation to the questions of culture, power, and place—the effect of their participation in what was once seen as their descriptions of these constructions. Contesting the classical idea of culture as the shared, the agreed upon, and the orderly, Culture, Power, Place is an important intervention in the disciplines of anthropology and cultural studies.

Contributors. George E. Bisharat, John Borneman, Rosemary J. Coombe, Mary M. Crain, James Ferguson, Akhil Gupta, Kristin Koptiuch, Karen Leonard, Richard Maddox, Lisa H. Malkki, John Durham Peters, Lisa Rofel

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cover of Cur homo?: A History of the Thesis of Man as a Replacement for Fallen Angels

Cur homo?

A History of the Thesis of Man as a Replacement for Fallen Angels

Vojtech Novotný

Karolinum Press, 2014

Examining, outlining, elucidating, and supplementing the existing body of scholarship concerning the medieval theological supposition that man was created as a replacement for fallen angels, Cur Homo? traces the implications of the question from the first century of the common era to the present day.
           
First introduced by St. Augustine and developed by other church fathers, the concept truly flourished in the twelfth century, when it was decided that man is an “original” being, created for its own sake, for whom God created the world. Vojtech Novotný goes on to trace the idea as it gradually faded over the centuries and, more recently, has been revived in the fields of modern philosophical thought.
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Curandereando

Sacred Decolonial Healing

Lani Cupchoy

University of Arizona Press, 2026

Curandereando: Sacred Decolonial Healing reclaims curanderismo as a living and revolutionary practice of ancestral wisdom, resilience, and renewal. Blending poetry, Spanglish storytelling, oral histories, and testimonios, this hybrid work illuminates healing as both a sacred tradition and a decolonial act of resistance.

The book traces curanderismo’s survival under colonial oppression, its adaptations across diasporas, and its vital role in addressing contemporary struggles for ecological balance, cultural survival, and social justice. By centering diverse healers and community voices, it resists folkloric portrayals and instead presents curanderismo as an evolving practice deeply relevant to today’s crises.

Accessible yet scholarly, Curandereando bridges sacred traditions with academic discourse, challenging Western medical dominance while offering holistic frameworks grounded in ancestral knowledge. This book is an essential resource for Chicana/o and Latina/o studies, ethnic studies, Indigenous studies, gender and sexuality studies, and environmental justice. It will also resonate with community healers, educators, and readers seeking decolonial approaches to wellness, spirituality, and cultural renewal.

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cover of Curated Decay: Heritage beyond Saving

Curated Decay

Heritage beyond Saving

Caitlin DeSilvey

University of Minnesota Press, 2017

Transporting readers from derelict homesteads to imperiled harbors, postindustrial ruins to Cold War test sites, Curated Decay presents an unparalleled provocation to conventional thinking on the conservation of cultural heritage. Caitlin DeSilvey proposes rethinking the care of certain vulnerable sites in terms of ecology and entropy, and explains how we must adopt an ethical stance that allows us to collaborate with—rather than defend against—natural processes. 

Curated Decay chronicles DeSilvey’s travels to places where experiments in curated ruination and creative collapse are under way, or under consideration. It uses case studies from the United States, Europe, and elsewhere to explore how objects and structures produce meaning not only in their preservation and persistence, but also in their decay and disintegration. Through accessible and engaging discussion of specific places and their stories, it traces how cultural memory is generated in encounters with ephemeral artifacts and architectures. 

An interdisciplinary reframing of the concept of the ruin that combines historical and philosophical depth with attentive storytelling, Curated Decay represents the first attempt to apply new theories of materiality and ecology to the concerns of critical heritage studies.

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Curating As Ethics

Jean-Paul Martinon

University of Minnesota Press, 2020

A new ethics for the global practice of curating
 

Today, everyone is a curator. What was once considered a hallowed expertise is now a commonplace and global activity. Can this new worldwide activity be ethical and, if yes, how? This book argues that curating can be more than just selecting, organizing, and presenting information in galleries or online. Curating can also constitute an ethics, one of acquiring, arranging, and distributing an always conjectural knowledge about the world. 

Curating as Ethics is primarily philosophical in scope, evading normative approaches to ethics in favor of an intuitive ethics that operates at the threshold of thought and action. It explores the work of authors as diverse as Heidegger, Spinoza, Meillassoux, Mudimbe, Chalier, and Kofman. Jean-Paul Martinon begins with the fabric of these ethics: how it stems from matter, how it addresses death, how it apprehends interhuman relationships. In the second part he establishes the ground on which the ethics is based, the things that make up the curatorial—for example, the textual and visual evidence or the digital medium. The final part focuses on the activity of curating as such—sharing, caring, preparing, dispensing, and so on. 

With its invigorating new approach to curatorial studies, Curating as Ethics moves beyond the field of museum and exhibition studies to provide an ethics for anyone engaged in this highly visible activity, including those using social media as a curatorial endeavor, and shows how philosophy and curating can work together to articulate the world today.

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