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This volume brings together research and artistic practices that challenge dominant narratives around motherhood.

Performing Maternities is a collection of essays, creative work, images, and scripts that emerged out of an online international symposium held at Brighton University in November 2020. Together, the contributors challenge, celebrate, and share the normative, the queer, the transgressive, the joy, and the pain of performing maternity. The book asks key questions about the construction of maternal identities and mythologies in the contemporary world; the ways these affect individuals in different social, economic, and sexual identities; and how—as mothers, writers, artists, parents, and grandparents—we can address and challenge those identities.
 

A freshly translated critical edition of the infamous eighteenth-century sadist’s sprawling work of eroticism that endures today as a serious philosophical argument.

The infamous libertine Marquis de Sade (1740–1814), from whose name we derive the word sadism, wove into his pornographic writings many strands of philosophical brilliance whose insights, interspersed between appalling descriptions of sexual deviance, have perplexed readers for centuries. First published in 1795, Philosophy in the Boudoir remains one of the most influential of these works, containing a powerful essay that distills Sade’s most illicit ideas into a compelling argument for personal freedom. In it, Sade experiments with forms drawn from sentimental fiction, pornography, philosophical dialogue, and drama to both satirize his contemporaries and champion the virtues of the heroic libertine—an important intellectual precursor to ideas further developed by Nietzsche, Freud, and others. 

This new critical edition is freshly translated into contemporary English and includes a scholarly introduction and extensive notes that illuminate Sade’s myriad allusions and cultural connections, particularly to the larger world of Enlightenment Europe. 

Understanding the significance of adult play in the life of modern societies

Within the social sciences, few matters are as significant as the study of human play--or as neglected. In Play Reconsidered, rather than viewing play simply as a preoccupation of the young and a vehicle for skill development, Thomas S. Henricks argues that it’s a social and cultural phenomenon of adult life, enveloped by wider structures and processes of society. In that context, he argues that a truly sociological approach to play should begin with a consideration of the largely overlooked writings on play and play-related topics by some of the classic sociological thinkers of the twentieth century.

Henricks explores Karl Marx’s analysis of creativity in human labor, examines Emile Durkheim’s observations on the role of ritual and the formation of collective consciousness, extends Max Weber’s ideas about the process of rationalization to the realm of expressive culture and play, surveys Georg Simmel’s distinctive approach to sociology and sociability, and discusses Erving Goffman’s focus on human conduct as process and play as “encounter.” These and other discussions of the contributions of more recent sociologists are framed by an initial consideration of Johan Huizinga’s famous challenge to understand the nature and significance of play. In a closing synthesis, Henricks distinguishes play from other forms of human social expression, particularly ritual, communitas, and work.

Play is a key part of human relationships, and we engage in it during every stage and in every facet of our lives. We develop games to include decision-making, risk, chance, competition, and cooperation, which mirror how we navigate social engagement in our everyday lives. In Playing Sociology: Theory and Games for Coping with Mimetic Crisis and Social Conflict, Martino Doni and Stefano Tomelleri employ gaming as a lens through which they analyze the underlying and sometimes hidden aspects of social relationships and conventions. They also provide five sociological games that can be played by teams in workplaces, classrooms, and other settings to encourage creative thinking and to create abstract ways to explore systemic or ongoing conflicts among group members. This research offers a new way to look at and participate in relational dynamics in both theory and practice.

A lucid guide to the radical politics of prison abolitionists


There is growing recognition that mass incarceration is unjust and undemocratic, but prison abolition continues to be dismissed as naïve, idealistic, and out of touch with reality. Anna Terwiel challenges this view, carefully examining the work of abolitionist thinkers and activists since the 1960s to argue that prison abolition is a realist political project. Abolition, Terwiel shows, is oriented toward practical realities and offers concrete proposals for radical democratic change.

Based on insightful readings of renowned abolitionists such as Michel Foucault, Liat Ben-Moshe, and Angela Y. Davis, Prison Abolition for Realists illuminates the realist aspects of their approaches as well as the important differences between them. Distinguishing between paranoid, purist, and agonistic styles of abolitionism, Terwiel argues that an agonistic approach holds the most promise for democratic change to carceral systems. Embodied in the work of Davis, agonistic abolitionism combines radical critique with efforts to build new democratic institutions while accepting that all political achievements will be imperfect. Pursuing examples of what this looks like in practice, Terwiel explores grassroots transformative justice efforts, like those of Communities Against Rape and Abuse. She also proposes a “right to comfort” to support incarcerated people’s demands for air conditioners in extremely hot prisons, showing how state institutions, civil law, and rights claims can be potential resources for abolitionists.

Nuanced and illuminating, Prison Abolition for Realists affirms abolition’s viability during a time of multiple, ongoing crises. While many despair at the state of the world, Terwiel reveals how abolition offers an actionable politics of the possible. Far from being unrealistic, abolition is an indispensable part of a realist politics.

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A selection of case studies on prophecy, belief, and political strategic thought.

Ralph Wigram was a minor British bureaucrat who is known to a small part of posterity only because Winston Churchill paid tribute to him as the man who warned of the Nazi threat with such persistence, conviction, and hard evidence that Churchill had the wherewithal to make the case to the British people. Wigram died at the end of 1936, just before the war he warned against had begun. He might have changed the course of history—if only people had believed him.

Prophets like Wigram are a permanent fixture of a world without certainty. Oracles, shamans, wiseacres, astrologers, and swamis of all shades populate our myths, legends, and Bibles. Today, our lives are inundated with the wisdom of professional forecasters, intelligence analysts, and threat mongers. Why do many of us, and especially our leaders, find it so difficult to heed warnings? We tend to underreact to some, overreact to others, and then point fingers when what “nobody ever anticipated” comes to pass. Why is prophecy so dogged?

Prophecy in Politics takes up a vast, complex, and well-worn subject—the future—and reduces it to its most essential aspects, especially belief. It revisits a half-dozen familiar and not-so-familiar incidents of prophecy, from the warnings given to Stalin about Operation Barbarossa to those given to Bill Clinton and George W. Bush about “terrorism,” to the Cassandras periodically promising collapse in the financial markets, to uncover a pattern of complacency and neglect. Finally, Ken Weisbrode proposes what all of us might do to overcome complacency and make prophecy work better for us. This is not a handbook or an attempt to stand in the vanguard of political or strategic thought on futurism, futures studies, or futurology; rather, it is a concise overview and an idiosyncratic but nevertheless useful guide to thinking about the past and present condition of prophecy.