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Described by Aristotle as the most vital of senses, touch contains both the physical and the metaphysical in its ability to express the determination of being. To manifest itself, touch makes a movement outwards, beyond the body, and relies on a specific physical involvement other senses do not require: to touch is already to be active and to activate. This fundamental ontology makes touch the most essential of all senses.

This volume of ‘Law and the Senses’ attempts to illuminate and reconsider the complex and interflowing relations and contradictions between the tactful intrusion of the law and the untactful movement of touch. Compelling contributors from arts, literature and social science disciplines alongside artist presentations explore touch’s boundaries and formal and informal ‘laws’ of the senses. Each contribution unveils a multi-faceted new dimension to the force of touch, its ability to form, deform and reform what it touches. In unique ways, each of the several contributions to this volume recognises the trans-corporeality of touch to traverse the boundaries on the body and entangle other bodies and spaces, thus challenging the very notion of corporeal integrity and human being.

In Arab culture, at the ineffable point where music meets emotion, lies ṭarab. Often glossed as the ecstasy experienced and expressed when performing or listening to singing, instrumental works, and recitations of poetry, ṭarab is both a practice and an orienting concept central to musical aesthetics and spirituality characteristic of Middle Eastern cultures.

Gathering fifteen essays by scholars of music, affect, literature, religion, and education, Ṭarab extends the study of ṭarab historically, geographically, and sociologically. Historical essays explore ṭarab’s role in the medieval Middle East and the Ottoman Empire. Turning to the modern era, authors examine ṭarab and related concepts in Egypt, Albania, and Iraq, and among Turkish Roma and Lebanese Maronite Christians. The contributors also address contemporary practitioners and the intersections of ṭarab and maqām, belly dancing, music streaming, and university music ensembles. Situating this unique cultural concept in a global context, these studies enrich the story of ṭarab and provide new insight into music’s powerful emotional appeal.

Winner of the 2021 Gourmand Awards, Asian Section & Culinary History Section

Filipino cuisine is a delicious fusion of foreign influences, adopted and transformed into its own unique flavor. But to the Americans who came to colonize the islands in the 1890s, it was considered inferior and lacking in nutrition. Changing the food of the Philippines was part of a war on culture led by Americans as they attempted to shape the islands into a reflection of their home country.

Taste of Control tells what happened when American colonizers began to influence what Filipinos ate, how they cooked, and how they perceived their national cuisine. Food historian René Alexander D. Orquiza, Jr. turns to a variety of rare archival sources to track these changing attitudes, including the letters written by American soldiers, the cosmopolitan menus prepared by Manila restaurants, and the textbooks used in local home economics classes. He also uncovers pockets of resistance to the colonial project, as Filipino cookbooks provided a defense of the nation’s traditional cuisine and culture.

Through the topic of food, Taste of Control explores how, despite lasting less than fifty years, the American colonial occupation of the Philippines left psychological scars that have not yet completely healed, leading many Filipinos to believe that their traditional cooking practices, crops, and tastes were inferior. We are what we eat, and this book reveals how food culture served as a battleground over Filipino identity.

Teaching with Tenderness follows in the tradition of bell hooks's Teaching to Transgress and Paulo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed, inviting us to draw upon contemplative practices (yoga, meditation, free writing, mindfulness, ritual) to keep our hearts open as we reckon with multiple injustices. Teaching with tenderness makes room for emotion, offers a witness for experiences people have buried, welcomes silence, breath and movement, and sees justice as key to our survival. It allows us to rethink our relationship to grading, office hours, desks, and faculty meetings, sees paradox as a constant companion, moves us beyond binaries; and praises self and community care.

Tenderness examines contemporary challenges to teaching about race, gender, class, nationality, sexuality, religion, and other hierarchies. It examines the ethical, emotional, political, and spiritual challenges of teaching power-laden, charged issues and the consequences of shifting power relations in the classroom and in the community. Attention to current contributions in the areas of contemplative practices, trauma theory, multiracial feminist pedagogy, and activism enable us to envision steps toward a pedagogy of liberation. The book encourages active engagement and makes room for self-reflective learning, teaching, and scholarship.

In an era of accelerating extinctions, what does it mean to discover thousands of new species in the deep sea?

As we see the catastrophic effects of the Anthropocene proliferate, advanced technologies also grant us greater access to the furthest reaches of the world’s oceans, facilitating the discovery of countless new species. Sorting through the implications of this strange paradox, Stacy Alaimo explores the influence this newfound intimacy with the deep sea might have on our broader relationship to the nonhuman world. While many images of these abyssal creatures circulate as shallow clickbait, aesthetic representations can be enticing lures for speculating about their lives, profoundly expanding our environmental concern.

The Abyss Stares Back analyzes a diverse range of scientific, literary, and artistic accounts of deep-sea exploration, including work from the naturalist William Beebe and the artist Else Bostelmann as well as results of the Census of Marine Life that began at the turn of the twenty-first century. As she focuses on oft-overlooked creatures of the deep, such as tubeworms, hatchetfish, siphonophores, and cephalopods, which are typically cast as “alien,” Alaimo shows how depictions of the deep seas have been enmeshed in long colonial histories and racist constructions of a threatening abyss.

Drawing on feminist environmentalism, posthumanism, science and technology studies, and Indigenous and non-Western perspectives, Alaimo details how our understanding of science is fundamentally altered by aesthetic encounters with these otherworldly life forms. She argues that, although the deep sea is often thought of as a lifeless void with little connection to human existence, our increasing devastation of this realm underscores our ethical obligation to protect the biodiverse life in the depths. When the abyss stares back, it demands recognition.

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A deconstruction of gender through the voices of Siri, HAL 9000, and other computers that talk

Although computer-based personal assistants like Siri are increasingly ubiquitous, few users stop to ask what it means that some assistants are gendered female, others male. Why is Star Trek’s computer coded as female, while HAL 9000 in 2001: A Space Odyssey is heard as male? By examining how gender is built into these devices, author Liz W. Faber explores contentious questions around gender: its fundamental constructedness, the rigidity of the gender binary, and culturally situated attitudes on male and female embodiment.

Faber begins by considering talking spaceships like those in Star Trek, the film Dark Star, and the TV series Quark, revealing the ideologies that underlie space-age progress. She then moves on to an intrepid decade-by-decade investigation of computer voices, tracing the evolution from the masculine voices of the ’70s and ’80s to the feminine ones of the ’90s and ’00s. Faber ends her account in the present, with incisive looks at the film Her and Siri herself.

Going beyond current scholarship on robots and AI to focus on voice-interactive computers, The Computer’s Voice breaks new ground in questions surrounding media, technology, and gender. It makes important contributions to conversations around the gender gap and the increasing acceptance of transgender people. 

While the literature on “new institutionalism” explains the stability of institutional arrangements within countries and the divergence of paths of institutional development between countries, Federico Ferrara takes a “historical institutionalist” approach to theorize dynamic processes of institutional reproduction, institutional decay, and institutional change in explaining the development of political institutions. Ferrara synthesizes “power-based” or “power-distributional” explanations and “ideas-based” “legitimation explanations.” He specifies the psychological “microfoundations” of processes of institutional development, drawing heavily from the findings of experimental psychology to ensure that the explanation is grounded in clear and realistic assumptions regarding human motivation, cognition, and behavior. Aside from being of interest to scholars and graduate students in political science and other social-scientific disciplines whose research concentrates on the genesis of political institutions, their evolution over time, and their impact on the stability of political order and the quality of governance, the book will be required reading in graduate courses and seminars in comparative politics where the study of institutions and their development ranks among the subfield’s most important subjects.

A groundbreaking critique of the digital world that analyzes its universal technological foundations

Whence that nagging sense that something in the digital is amiss—that, as wonderful as our devices are, time spent on smartphones and computers leaves us sour, enervated, alienated? The Digital and Its Discontents uniquely explains that worry and points us toward a more satisfying relationship between our digital lives and our nondigital selves, one that requires a radical change in the way we incorporate technology into our lives.

Aden Evens analyzes universal technological principles—in particular, the binary logic—to show that they encourage certain ways of thinking while making others more challenging or impossible. What is out of reach for any digital machine is contingency, the ontological principle that refuses every rule. As humans engage ourselves and our world ever more through digital machines, we are losing touch with contingency and so banishing from our lives the accidental and unexpected that fuel our most creative and novel possibilities for living.

Taking cues from philosophy rather than cultural or media theory, Evens argues that the consequences of this erosion of contingency are significant yet often overlooked because the same values that make the digital seem so desirable also make contingency seem unimportant—without contingency the digital is confined to what has already been thought, and yet the digital’s ubiquity has allowed it to disguise this inherent sterility. Responsive only to desires that meet the demands of its narrow logic, the digital requires its users to practice those same ideological dictates, instituting a hegemony of thought and value sustained by the pervasive presence of digital mechanisms. Interweaving technical and philosophical concepts, The Digital and Its Discontents advances a powerful and urgent argument about the digital and its impact on our lives.

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In Echoes of Trauma, medical anthropologist Gwenn Jensen traces the longitudinal ramifications of racism, the chronic stress of imprisonment in concentration camps, and widespread healthcare inadequacies on the well-being of Japanese American Nisei during WWII and beyond.

Based on ninety oral history interviews conducted between 1995 and 2005, Jensen’s work uncovers long-term health impacts on former incarcerees, relating personal stories of Japanese Americans with archival corroboration of their traumatic experiences of having been made prisoners in their own land. These memories illuminate the betrayal and lifelong consequences of imprisonment not only on physical and psychological health but also including intergenerational trauma passed on to subsequent generations. Echoes of Trauma details these short- and long-term health effects and records the stories of these Americans for posterity.

In the wake of the current political climate, with echoes of this past reverberating, the reexamination of Japanese American incarceration undertaken here underscores the importance of comprehending the fallout from incomprehensible injustice visited upon innocent and law-abiding citizens.