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A radical critique of architecture that places disability at the heart of the built environment

Disability critiques of architecture usually emphasize the need for modification and increased access, but The Architecture of Disability calls for a radical reorientation of this perspective by situating experiences of impairment as a new foundation for the built environment. With its provocative proposal for “the construction of disability,” this book fundamentally reconsiders how we conceive of and experience disability in our world.

Stressing the connection between architectural form and the capacities of the human body, David Gissen demonstrates how disability haunts the history and practice of architecture. Examining various historic sites, landscape designs, and urban spaces, he deconstructs the prevailing functionalist approach to accommodating disabled people in architecture and instead asserts that physical capacity is essential to the conception of all designed space.

By recontextualizing the history of architecture through the discourse of disability, The Architecture of Disability presents a unique challenge to current modes of architectural practice, theory, and education. Envisioning an architectural design that fully integrates disabled persons into its production, it advocates for looking beyond traditional notions of accessibility and shows how certain incapacities can offer us the means to positively reimagine the roots of architecture.

Collected writings from a visionary thinker about the perilous edge between patriotism and fascism
 

How do nationalism and patriotism shape our understanding of identity, and when do they drift into dangerous territory? Marta Figlerowicz gathers a selection of writings from Maria Janion, one of Eastern Europe’s most profound and original intellectuals, to explore this fine line. Between her birth in Vilnius in 1926 and her death in Warsaw in 2020, Janion witnessed some of the most consequential events of the turbulent twentieth century: the rise of authoritarian nationalism in Poland, German occupation during World War II, Soviet control, and Poland’s uneasy integration into the West. As Western countries face their own nationalist resurgences, Janion’s writing holds tools to help move through this historical condition.

The Bad Child offers sharp insights into how societies develop and assert their identities and histories—often at the cost of the people. Janion’s reflections on fascism, popular culture, and national self-fashioning presciently name and critique regional dynamics that have most recently resulted in the war between Russia and Ukraine, and they broadly expose the illusions that cultures can promote and the dangerous slide from national pride to exclusionary right-wing politics. A queer woman and survivor of World War II, a leftist who resisted Soviet orthodoxy, Janion lends a uniquely disruptive voice to contemporary discussions of fascism, and her insights resonate far beyond her Eastern European roots.

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A powerhouse in photographic theory—updated and with a new essay

Every day, photographic images are relied upon as documents, evidence, and records in courtrooms, hospitals, and police work. But how did such usages come to be established, and when? What agencies and institutions had the power to give them this status? And what are the consequences of photographic representation? Drawing on semiotics, cultural theory, and the work of Foucault and Althusser, John Tagg rejects the idea of photography as a record of reality and traces a history that has profound implications not only for the theory of photography but also for understanding the role of new means of representation in modern social regulation. Now with a new essay situating this volume in the changed horizon of cultural politics, The Burden of Representation argues for a rigorous analysis of the meaning, status, and effects of photographs, rooted in a historical grasp of the growth of the modern state.

Seeing the camp as a persistent political instrument in Israel–Palestine and beyond

The Common Camp underscores the role of the camp as a spatial instrument employed for reshaping, controlling, and struggling over specific territories and populations. Focusing on the geopolitical complexity of Israel–Palestine and the dramatic changes it has experienced during the past century, this book explores the region’s extensive networks of camps and their existence as both a tool of colonial power and a makeshift space of resistance. 

Examining various forms of camps devised by and for Zionist settlers, Palestinian refugees, asylum seekers, and other groups, Irit Katz demonstrates how the camp serves as a common thread in shaping lands and lives of subjects from across the political spectrum. Analyzing the architectural and political evolution of the camp as a modern instrument engaged by colonial and national powers (as well as those opposing them), Katz offers a unique perspective on the dynamics of Israel–Palestine, highlighting how spatial transience has become permanent in the ongoing story of this contested territory. 

The Common Camp presents a novel approach to the concept of the camp, detailing its varied history as an apparatus used for population containment and territorial expansion as well as a space of everyday life and subversive political action. Bringing together a broad range of historical and ethnographic materials within the context of this singular yet versatile entity, the book locates the camp at the core of modern societies and how they change and transform. 

Excavating Marx’s early writings to rethink the rights of the poor and the idea of the commons in an era of unprecedented privatization
 

The politics of dispossession are everywhere. Troubling developments in intellectual property, genomics, and biotechnology are undermining established concepts of property, while land appropriation and ecological crises reconfigure basic institutions of ownership. In The Dispossessed, Daniel Bensaïd examines Karl Marx’s early writings to establish a new framework for addressing the rights of the poor, the idea of the commons, and private property as a social institution.

In his series of articles from 1842–43 about Rhineland parliamentary debates over the privatization of public lands and criminalization of poverty under the rubric of the “theft of wood,” Marx identified broader anxieties about customary law, property rights, and capitalist efforts to privatize the commons. Bensaïd studies these writings to interrogate how dispossession continues to function today as a key modality of power. Brilliantly tacking between past and present, The Dispossessed discloses continuity and rupture in our relationships to property and, through that, to one another.

In addition to Bensaïd’s prescient work of political philosophy, The Dispossessed includes new translations of Marx’s original “theft of wood” articles and an introductory essay by Robert Nichols that lucidly contextualizes the essays.

How lens-based art from Southeast Asia offers alternative visions for ecological sustainability

A new paradigm of ecologically minded artistic practices is taking shape in Southeast Asia—one that at once tracks ecological destruction and works specifically to cultivate deeper feelings of empathy toward the environment. Examining a range of photography and video work, The Empathic Lens explores how these lens-based projects respond to increasingly urgent concerns related to climate disaster and capitalist acceleration.

In this analysis of work produced across Cambodia, Vietnam, and Singapore, Brianne Cohen highlights artists for whom rampant urban development, resource extraction, and environmental toxicity are close at hand. As each artist takes their lens to these realities, Cohen shows, they draw on Indigenous knowledge and local traditions that have long recognized the kinship of humans and nonhumans. Engaging often-censored discourses of Indigenous land relations and environmental justice in a region with a long history of colonial and neocolonial development, Cohen traces genealogies of empathy and animism to demonstrate how these works develop sustainable visions for the future coexistence of planetary life.

The first critical account of marginalized artworks that depict the centrality of the more-than-human in Southeast Asian Indigenous worldviews, The Empathic Lens makes a powerful case for the relevance of Southeast Asian lens-based art in contemporary media practice and the art of the Anthropocene.

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Examines how the humanitarian order advances a message of moral triumph and care while abandoning the dispossessed

Prompted by a growing number of refugees and other displaced people, intersections of design and humanitarianism are proliferating. From the IKEA Foundation’s Better Shelter to Airbnb’s Open Homes program, the consumer economy has engaged the global refugee crisis with seemingly new tactics that normalize an institutionally sanctioned politics of evasion. Exploring “the global shelter imaginary,” this book charts the ways shelter functions as a form of rightless relief that expels recognition of the rights of the displaced and advances political paradoxes of displacement itself. 

The meaning of hospitality in Western thought—from the Bible to Derrida

The evolution of the idea of hospitality can be traced alongside the development of Western civilization. Etymologically, the host is the “master,” but this identity is established through expropriation and loss—the best host is the one who gives the most, ultimately relinquishing what defines him as master.

In The Hostess, Tracy McNulty asks, What are the implications for personhood of sharing a person—a wife or daughter—as an act of hospitality? In many traditions, the hostess is viewed not as a subject but as the master’s property. A foreign presence that both sustains and undercuts him, the hostess embodies the interplay of self and other within the host’s own identity.

Here McNulty combines critical readings of the Bible and Pierre Klossowski’s trilogy The Laws of Hospitality with analyses of exogamous marital exchange, theological works from the Talmud to Aquinas, the writings of Kant and Nietzsche, and the theory of femininity in the work of Freud and Lacan. Ultimately, she contends, hospitality involves the boundary between the proper and the improper, affecting the subject as well as interpersonal relations.

A handbook for students of literature with particular attention to all those who have ever been made to feel like outsiders in our field, The Imposter’s Guide to Writing About Literature democratizes access to the knowledge necessary for successful professionalization—and especially publication—within literary studies.