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In recent years we have witnessed massive demonstrations of denial, refusal, and rejection exploding in one country after another. The squares of the world have become organizational focal points for rebellion and repression. What does such collective negation mean, and what comes afterward? This issue explores the forms of a reinvigorated, experimental communism: councils, assemblies, communes, squares, occupys, horizontalism, recovered factories, and cooperative farms and community gardens. Practitioners of this new model of “communism as communizing” attempt to change fundamental social relations from the bottom up.

By combining insider knowledge with sophisticated theoretical scrutiny, the contributors to this issue approach eruptions of rebellion from a variety of historical, economic, and methodological perspectives. Writing not only about but also within such forces of progressive resistance around the world, they investigate the complex, hopeful, and contradictory process of creating new social, economic, and political structures through negation.

In the face of the gradual saturation of US public education by the logics of neoliberalism, educators often find themselves at a loss to respond, let alone resist. Through state defunding and many other “reforms” fueled by austerity politics, a majority of educators are becoming casual labor in US universities while those who hang onto secure employment are pressed to act as self-supporting entrepreneurs or do more with less. Focusing on the discipline of writing studies, this collection addresses the sense of crisis that many educators experience in this age of austerity.

The chapters in this book chronicle how neoliberal political economy shapes writing assessments, curricula, teacher agency, program administration, and funding distribution. Contributors also focus on how neoliberal political economy dictates the direction of scholarship, because the economic and political agenda shaping the terms of work, the methods of delivery, and the ways of valuing and assessing writing also shape the primary concerns and directions of scholarship.

Composition in the Age of Austerity offers critical accounts of how the restructuring of higher education is shaping the daily realities of composition programs. The book documents the effects and implications of the current restructuring, examines how cherished rhetorical ideals actually leave the field unprepared to respond effectively to defunding and corporatizing trends, and establishes points of departure for collective response.

This timely, necessary collection of essays provides feminist analyses of a recession-era media culture characterized by the reemergence and refashioning of familiar gender tropes, including crisis masculinity, coping women, and postfeminist self-renewal. Interpreting media forms as diverse as reality television, financial journalism, novels, lifestyle blogs, popular cinema, and advertising, the contributors reveal gendered narratives that recur across media forms too often considered in isolation from one another. They also show how, with a few notable exceptions, recession-era popular culture promotes affective normalcy and transformative individual enterprise under duress while avoiding meaningful critique of the privileged white male or the destructive aspects of Western capitalism. By acknowledging the contradictions between political rhetoric and popular culture, and between diverse screen fantasies and lived realities, Gendering the Recession helps to make sense of our postboom cultural moment.

Contributors. Sarah Banet-Weiser, Hamilton Carroll, Hannah Hamad, Anikó Imre, Suzanne Leonard, Isabel Molina-Guzmán, Sinéad Molony, Elizabeth Nathanson, Diane Negra, Tim Snelson, Yvonne Tasker, Pamela Thoma
 

In the aftermath of the global financial crisis in 2008, Britain’s government put into effect a hotly contested series of major cuts in public expenditure with the stated aim of restoring economic security. Since then, this reign of austerity continues to devastate contemporary Britain through a disconnected and unaffected political elite.
 
In The Violence of Austerity, David Whyte and Vickie Cooper bring together the passionate voices of campaigners and academics to show that rather than stimulating economic growth, austerity policies have led to a dismantling of the social systems that operated as a buffer against economic hardship. Chapters from major contributors—including Danny Dorling, Mary O’Hara and Rizwaan Sabir—show how austerity is a form of institutional violence more socially harmful and far-reaching than other more politicized and publicized forms of violence, such as terrorism or gun violence. Contributors expose highly significant cases of this institutional violence driven by public sector cuts: police attacks on the homeless, violent evictions of the rented sector, risks faced by people on workfare, and more. The Violence of Austerity is a devastating, authoritative study of the myriad ways austerity policies harm people in Britain that will resonate with anyone concerned with the increasing power of the political elite and the future of social welfare.