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The three essays in Image, written by leading philosophers of religion, explore the modern power of the visual at the intersection of the human and the technological. 

Modern life is steeped in images, image-making, and attempts to control the world through vision. Mastery of images has been advanced by technologies that expand and reshape vision and enable us to create, store, transmit, and display images. The three essays in Image, written by leading philosophers of religion Mark C. Taylor, Mary-Jane Rubenstein, and Thomas A. Carlson, explore the power of the visual at the intersection of the human and the technological. Building on Heidegger’s notion that modern humanity aims to master the world by picturing or representing the real, they investigate the contemporary culture of the image in its philosophical, religious, economic, political, imperial, and military dimensions, challenging the abstraction, anonymity, and dangerous disconnection of contemporary images.

Taylor traces a history of capitalism, focusing on its lack of humility, particularly in the face of mortality, and he considers art as a possible way to reconnect us to the earth. Through a genealogy of iconic views from space, Rubenstein exposes the delusions of conquest associated with extraterrestrial travel. Starting with the pressing issues of surveillance capitalism and facial recognition technology, Carlson extends Heidegger’s analysis through a meditation on the telematic elimination of the individual brought about by totalizing technologies. Together, these essays call for a consideration of how we can act responsibly toward the past in a way that preserves the earth for future generations. Attending to the fragility of material things and to our own mortality, they propose new practices of imagination grounded in love and humility.

Winner 2025 Bryce Wood Book Award

This is a book about how Nahuas—native speakers of Nahuatl, the common language of the Aztec Empire and of more than 2.5 million Indigenous people today—have explored, understood, and explained the world around them in pre-invasion, colonial, and contemporary time periods. It is a deep dive into Nahua theoretical and practical inquiry related to the environment, as well as the dynamic networks in which Nahuas create, build upon, and share knowledges, practices, tools, and objects to meet social, political, and economic needs.

In this work, author Kelly S. McDonough addresses Nahua understanding of plants and animals, medicine and ways of healing, water and water control, alphabetic writing, and cartography. Interludes between the chapters offer short biographical sketches and interviews with contemporary Nahua scientists, artists, historians, and writers, accompanied by their photos. The book also includes more than twenty full-color images from sources including the Florentine Codex, a sixteenth-century collaboration between Indigenous and Spanish scholars considered the most comprehensive extant source on the pre-Hispanic and early colonial Aztec (Mexica) world.

In Mexico today, the terms “Indigenous” and “science and technology” are rarely paired together. When they are, the latter tend to be framed as unrecoverable or irreparably damaged pre-Hispanic traditions⁠, relics confined to a static past. In Indigenous Science and Technology, McDonough works against such erroneous and racialized discourses with a focus on Nahua environmental engagements and relationalities, systems of communication, and cultural preservation and revitalization. Attention to these overlooked or obscured knowledges provides a better understanding of Nahua culture, past and present, as well as the entangled local and global histories in which they were—and are—vital actors.
 

Informatics of Domination is an experimental collection addressing formations of power that manifest through technical systems and white capitalist patriarchy in the twenty-first century. The volume takes its name from a chart in Donna J. Haraway’s canonical 1985 essay “A Manifesto for Cyborgs.” Haraway theorizes the informatics of domination as a feminist, diagrammatic concept for situating power and a world system from which the figure of the cyborg emerges. Informatics of Domination builds on Haraway’s chart as an open structure for thought, inviting fifty scholars, artists, and creative writers to unfold new perspectives. Their writings take on a variety of forms, such as essays on artificial intelligence, disability and protest, and transpacific imaginaries; conversations with an AI trained on Black oral history; a three-dimensional response to Mexico-US border tensions; hand-drawn images on queer autotheory; ecological fictions about gut microbiomes and wet markets; and more. Together, the writings take up the unfinished structure of the chart in order to proliferate critiques of white capitalist patriarchal power with the study of information systems, networks, and computation today. This volume includes an afterword by Haraway.

Contributors. Dalida María Benfield, Zach Blas, Ama Josephine Budge Johnstone, micha cárdenas, Amy Sara Carroll, Shu Lea Cheang, Jian Neo Chen, Heather Dewey-Hagborg, Ranjodh Singh Dhaliwal, Stephanie Dinkins, Ricardo Dominguez, Ashley Ferro-Murray, Matthew Fuller, Jacob Gaboury, Jennifer Gabrys, Alexander R. Galloway, Jennifer Mae Hamilton, Donna J. Haraway, Eva Hayward, Stefan Helmreich, Kathy High, Leon J. Hilton, Ho Rui An, Hi'ilei Julia Kawehipuaakahaopulani Hobart, Tung-Hui Hu, Caroline A. Jones, Melody Jue, Homay King, Larissa Lai, Lawrence Lek, Esther Leslie, Alexis Lothian, Isadora Neves Marques, Radha May (Elisa Giardina-Papa, Nupur Mathur, and Bathsheba Okwenje), Shaka McGlotten, Mahan Moalemi, madison moore, Astrida Neimanis, Bahar Noorizadeh, Luciana Parisi, Thao Phan, Ana Teixeira Pinto, Luiza Prado de O. Martins, Rita Raley, Patricia Reed, Jennifer Rhee, Bassem Saad, Ashkan Sepahvand, Justin Talplacido Shoulder, Lucy Suchman, Ollie Zhang

From medieval to modern, exploring instrumental attitudes toward physical gadgets, diagrams, concepts, methods, and disciplines

Opening up the instrumental condition of the human for critical reflection and renewal, Instrumentality illuminates key moments in the intellectual history of the European Middle Ages. J. Allan Mitchell reveals how, in the predigital past, we can recognize many of the operative technics, analytics, and metaphorics that continue to shape human sense and cognition today.

Exploring the diverse modalities of medieval instruments, Mitchell’s case studies encompass techniques as seemingly distinct as time-keeping mechanisms, mathematical diagrams, logical syllogisms, and the literary devices of Geoffrey Chaucer and John Gower. A cultural and intellectual history, Mitchell’s work leads readers from three-dimensional objects (physical mechanisms) to two-dimensional inscriptions (maps and diagrams) and onward to overarching disciplinary norms in the early liberal and mechanical arts. Prying loose the subtle, adaptable, and generative concept of technical objects from limiting contemporary frameworks, he shows how these instruments are indispensable to the past—and the future—of the arts and culture at large.

While Hollywood has long been called “The Dream Factory,” and theatrical entertainment more broadly has been called “The Industry,” the significance of these names has rarely been explored. There are in fact striking overlaps between industrial rhetoric and practice and the development of theatrical and cinematic techniques for rehearsal and performance. Interchangeable Parts examines the history of acting pedagogy and performance practice in the United States, and their debts to industrial organization and philosophy. Ranging from the late nineteenth century through the end of the twentieth, the book recontextualizes the history of theatrical technique in light of the embrace of industrialization in US culture and society.
 
Victor Holtcamp explores the invocations of scientific and industrial rhetoric and philosophy in the founding of the first schools of acting, and echoes of that rhetoric in playwriting, production, and the cinema, as Hollywood in particular embraced this industrially infected model of acting.  In their divergent approaches to performance, the major US acting teachers (Lee Strasberg, Stella Adler, and Sanford Meisner) demonstrated strong rhetorical affinities for the language of industry, illustrating the pervasive presence of these industrial roots. The book narrates the story of how actors learned to learn to act, and what that process, for both stage and screen, owed to the interchangeable parts and mass production revolutions.

In Interface Frictions, Neta Alexander explores how ubiquitous design features in digital platforms reshape, condition, and break our bodies. She shows that while features such as refresh, playback speed, autoplay, and night mode are convenient, they can lead to “digital debility”—the slow and often invisible ways that technologies may harm human bodies. These features all assume an able-bodied user and at the same time push users to ignore their bodily limitations like the need for rest, nourishment, or movement. Building on the lived experiences of people with disabilities, Alexander explores alternative design solutions that arise from a multisensorial approach to communication. She demonstrates what can be gained from centering the nonaverage user, such as blind people who pioneered ways to control the playback speed of media, and Netflix subscribers with invisible disabilities like PTSD who successfully pushed the company to redesign its previews autoplay feature. Drawing on artworks, video games, and creative hacking by users with disabilities, Alexander challenges our understanding of media consumption, the attention economy, and the digital interface.