Böcker utgivna av Rowman & Littlefield International

A major collection of innovative new work by emerging and established scholars on the critical topic of ethics for climate governance, offering a wholly original proposal for reform to climate governance.

A major collection of innovative new work by emerging and established scholars on the critical topic of ethics for climate governance, offering a wholly original proposal for reform to climate governance.

Early Modern Aesthetics is a concise and accessible guide to the history of aesthetics in the early modern period. J. Colin McQuillan shows how philosophers concerned with art and beauty positioned themselves with respect to the ancients and the moderns, how they thought the arts were to be distinguished and classified, the principles they proposed for art and literary criticism, and how they made aesthetics a part of philosophy in the eighteenth century. The book explores the controversies that arose among philosophers with different views on these issues, their relation to the philosophy, science, and art, and their legacy for contemporary aesthetics.

What for decades could only be dreamt of is now almost within reach: the widespread provision of free online education, regardless of a geographic location, financial status, or ability to access conventional institutions of learning. But does open education really offer the openness, democracy and cost-effectiveness its supporters promise? Or will it lead to a two-tier system, where those who can't afford to attend a traditional university will have to make do with online, second-rate alternatives?Open Education engages critically with the creative disruption of the university through free online education. It puts into political context not just the Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCS) but also TED Talks, Wikiversity along with self-organised ';pirate' libraries and ';free universities' associated with the anti-austerity protests and the global Occupy movement. Questioning many of the ideas open education projects take for granted, including Creative Commons, it proposes a radically different model for the university and education in the twenty-first century.

The title of this timely and thought-provoking book, a French bestseller, refers to schoolgirls sending text messages to their friends on their smart phones. Michel Serres, one of Frances most important living intellectuals, uses this image to get at something far broader: that humans are formed and shaped by technologies, and that with the advent of computers, smart phones, and the Internet, a new human is being born.These new humans beings are our childrenthumbelina (petite poucette) and tom thumb (petit poucet)but technologies have been changing so fast that parents scarcely know their children. Serres documents this cultural revolution, arguing that there have been several similar revolutions in the past: from oral cultures to cultures focused on reading and writing; the advent of the printing press; and now the complex changes brought about by the new information technologieschanges that are taking place at an accelerated pace and that affect us all.

Is Stuart Hall a Cultural Studies Scholar or a Postcolonial Scholar? Or is it better to engage with his work as an intellectual of both fields?Postwar Britain witnessed the concurrent evolution of two new intellectual movements which have since become institutionalized as two major academic fields of enquiry; Cultural Studies and Postcolonial Studies. Although both fields are enormously diverse they have developed a parallel focus around the place of individuals in terms of race, ethnicity, class and gender.Beyond Britain offers a history of the major ideas that have shaped the evolution of a shared space of inquiry in British Cultural Studies and Postcolonial Studies. It uses the work of Stuart Hall, a figure a uniquely well positioned in both fields, to offer a rich cultural-historical study of the evolution of both movements. It argues that the questions which both movements have continued to preoccupy themselves, are as relevant today as they were when they first originated, which was also a moment of challenging a conformist, exclusivist, and self-sufficient nation's view of itself.

Words are everywhere. Ubiquitous, pervasive. Yet our relations with words are narrowly defined. How does the sound, feel, touch, taste, place, position, speed, and direction of words come to matter in their uses? Word begins from the premise that, if we consider words only in terms of language and as images, we overlook a range of bodily, sensory, affective and non-conscious relations with words. We overlook, too, their epistemological, methodological, experiential and political implications. This book seeks to redress this neglect by exploring words themselves in histories of language and contemporary theory, in print and typography, and through a series of empirical examples which include religion, embodiment, photography and performance. Word is a reminder that words live richly in the world. It is an invitation to recognise those non-linguistic word-relations that are already existing, and to bring new and generative encounters with words into being.

The concept of transnationalism has been widely used for many years to describe mobility and cross-border relations in the modern, globalized world. Most uses of the concept of transnationalism neglect its historical trajectory and largely ignore the networks that constructed its meaning and normativity.Transnationalism and the Jews directly relates ideas about transnationalism and cultural pluralism to Jewish historical experience. It shows how the Jews and ';Jewishness' has been a problematic issue for cultural thought since the Enlightenment, and how this problem produced the alternative ideas of culture and identity that are widely accepted today. It argues that Jewish experience and ';Jewishness' helped produced the modern concept of transnationalism and cultural pluralism.

On the Verge of a Planetary Civilization presents a philosophical contribution to integral ecologyan emerging approach to the field that crosses disciplinary boundaries of the humanities and sciences.In this original book, Sam Mickey argues for the transdisciplinary significance of philosophical concepts that facilitate understandings of and responses to the boundaries involved in ecological issues. Mickey demonstrates how much the provocative French philosopher Gilles Deleuze contributes to the development of such concepts, situating his work in dialogue with that of his colleagues Felix Guattari and Jacques Derrida, and with theorists who are adapting his concepts in contemporary contexts such as Isabelle Stengers, Catherine Keller, and the speculative realist movement of object-oriented ontology. The book focuses on the overlapping existential, social and environmental aspects of the ecological problems pervading our increasingly interconnected planet. It explores the boundaries betweenself and other, humans and nonhumans, sciences and humanities, monism and pluralism, sacred and secular, fact and fiction, the beginning and end of the world, and much more.

Desire is a term often used in conjunction with the subject. This desire is directed towards the real, which is defined as the generic core of the linguistic order. As a result of the focus on affect, the three termsdesire, the subject, the realhave been fundamentally shaken up and called into question. Affect, in various forms, is now a matter of concern across a wide range of disciplines including neuroscience, psychology, the humanities, and social sciences. All of these fields have a declared interest in affect, in emotions and sensations, in pathos, passions, and the senses.Desire After Affect argues that this affective euphoria cannot be explained solely in terms of a repression of language, logos, and reason. It argues that the affective turn is symptomatic of a fundamental shift in modes of thinking about the human condition. It explores what this means for the human and the posthuman, animal and machine, and calls for a new theory of subjectivation, a philosophy of media affect.

The phrase ';martial arts studies' is increasingly circulating as a term to describe a new field of interest. But many academic fields including history, philosophy, anthropology, and Area studies already engage with martial arts in their own particular way. Therefore, is there really such a thing as a unique field of martial arts studies?Martial Arts Studies is the first book to engage directly with these questions. It assesses the multiplicity and heterogeneity of possible approaches to martial arts studies, exploring orientations and limitations of existing approaches. It makes a case for constructing the field of martial arts studies in terms of key coordinates from post-structuralism, cultural studies, media studies, and post-colonialism. By using these anti-disciplinary approaches to disrupt the approaches of other disciplines, Martial Arts Studies proposes a field that both emerges out of and differs from its many disciplinary locations.

This book interrogates whether recent global protests and civil disobedience are transforming the way we understand contemporary democracy as an institutional system.

This book interrogates whether recent global protests and civil disobedience are transforming the way we understand contemporary democracy as an institutional system.

This book brings together contemporary theorists and practitioners to critically explore the state of psychogeography today.

This book brings together contemporary theorists and practitioners to critically explore the state of psychogeography today.

A metaphysical investigation of money and monetary value, exploring money as a social phenomenon, the metaphysics of financial value, materialism and measurement.

In the past few decades, it has become clear that the Western world's relation to nature has led to environmental degradation so wide-ranging that it threatens the existence of human civilizations as we have come to know them. The onset of anthropogenic climate change and the increasing threats of resource depletions are the most obvious signs of an environmental crisis. This book attempts to examine the metaphysical underpinnings of our current environmental crisis, thereby viewing it from a philosophical perspective. Using Martin Heidegger's writings on the history of being as its lynchpin, it examines how humans have come to view nature as a giant array of mere resources to be maximally exploited. Following Heidegger, Casey Rentmeester argues that this understanding of nature is rooted in the understanding of what it means to be that came about in ancient Greece. Rentmeester then utilizes elements of Heidegger's post-metaphysical later philosophy and aspects of early philosophical Daoism to create an alternative way to think about the relation between humans and nature that is environmentally sustainable.

The image of the Caribbean figure has been reconfigured by photography from the mid-19th century onwards. Initial images associated with the slave and indentured worker from the locations and legacies associated with plantation economies have been usurped by visual representations emerging from struggles for social, political and cultural autonomy. Contemporary visual artists engaging with the Caribbean as a 21st century globalised space have focused on visually re-imagining historical material and events as memories, histories and dreamscapes. Creole in the Archive uses photographic analysis to explore portraits, postcards and social documentation of the colonial worker between 1850 and 1960 and contemporary, often digital, visual art by post-independent, postcolonial Caribbean artists. Drawing on Derridean ideas of the archive, the book reconceptualises the Caribbean visual archive as contiguous and relational. It argues that using a creolising archive practice, the conjuncture of contemporary artworks, historical imagery and associated locations can develop insightful new multimodal representations of Caribbean subjectivities.

Through original analysis of three contemporary, auteur-directed melodramas (Matthew Weiner's Mad Men, Lars von Trier's Melancholia and Todd Haynes's Mildred Pierce), Living Screens reconceives and renovates the terms in which melodrama has been understood. Returning to Jean-Jacques Rousseau's foundational, Enlightenment-era melodrama Pygmalion with its revival of an old story about sculpted objects that spring to life, it contends that this early production prefigures the structure of contemporary melodramas and serves as a model for the way we interact with media today. Melodrama is conceptualized as a ';plastic' form with the capacity to mould and be moulded and that speaks to fundamental processes of mediation. Living Screens evokes the thrills, anxieties, and uncertainties accompanying our attachment to technologies that are close-at-hand yet have far-reaching effects. In doing so, it explores the plasticity of our current situation, in which we live with screens that melodramatically touch our lives.

Examines the relationship between cultural values and economic value, and how this has been managed over time and around the world in a variety of contexts.

Public toilets are places where individual identity is put to the test through experiences of fear, anxiety, shame, and embarrassment, yet also places where we shore up, confirm, and check the status of our gendered identities. In these highly gendered and sex-segregated places, people of various and varied identities come together and separately conduct their ';business' through socially contingent toileting habits and behaviors. Based on empirical research with men, women, gender non-conforming, and trans individuals who have a range of sexual identities, Little Vast Rooms of Undoing attempts to understand a nearly universal aspect of daily life in the contemporary West. Through a meditation on socially dictated practices and their associated emotions, it argues that experiences within public toilets expose the fissures of individual identity construction and understanding and opening the possibilities for a more relational and cohesive experience of the embodied self.

Political and economic models of society often operate at a level of abstraction so high that the connections between them, and their links to culture, are beyond reach. Bearing Society in Mind challenges these disciplinary boundaries and proposes an alternative frameworkthe social formation. The theory of social formation demonstrates how the fabric of society is made up of threads that are simultaneously economic, political, and cultural. Drawing on the work of theorists including Marx, Althusser, Butler, Zizek and Ranciere, Bearing Society in Mind makes the strongest case possible for the theoretical importance and political necessity of this concept. It simultaneously demonstrates that the social formation proves to be a very particular and peculiar type of ';concept'it is not a reflection or model of the world, but is definitively and concretely bound up with and constitutive of the world.

An interdisciplinary collection that seeks to explore Thai literature in the wider context of the global perspectives, themes and debates within the study of World Literature. In the wake of recent unrest in the country, it offers a rare insight into the unique cultural, political and historical context of Thailand.

The Care of Life: Transdisciplinary Perspectives in Bioethics and Biopolitics is a striking collection of interdisciplinary essays exploring key debates in, and the relationship between, bioethics and biopolitics.

The Care of Life: Transdisciplinary Perspectives in Bioethics and Biopolitics is a striking collection of interdisciplinary essays exploring key debates in, and the relationship between, bioethics and biopolitics.

What is narrative? What is distinctive about the great literary narratives? In virtue of what is a narrative fictional or non-fictional? In this important new book Peter Lamarque, one of the leading philosophers of literature at work today, explores these and related questions to bring new clarity and insight to debates about narrative in philosophy, critical theory, and narratology.He highlights opacity as a feature of literary narratives and examines the implications for our understanding of fictional worlds and fictional characters. Throughout he challenges received views about narrative, questioning the indispensability of narrative in an individuals self-conception and the importance of both truth and emotion as measures of literary greatness. He reflects on the non-fiction novel arguing that it does not weaken the distinction between fiction and no-fiction.The book offers a compelling and original account of these and other issues, making a critical contribution to topical and wide-ranging debates.

The notion of conscience remains one of the most widely used moral concepts and a cornerstone of ordinary moral thinking. This book explores where this widespread confidence in conscience stems from, examining the history of conscience as a moral concept and its characteristic moral phenomenology.Jason Howard provides a comprehensive reassessment of the function of conscience in moral life, detailing along the way the manifold problems that arise when we believe our conscience is more reliable than is actually warranted. The result is a step-by-step evaluation of our most accepted assumptions. Howard goes on to argue, from a phenomenological perspective, that conscience is indispensable for understanding moral experience. He capitalizes on a dialectical perspective developed by Hegel and Ricoeur, in which conscience is seen as the recognition of the other, and integrates this with work in the philosophy of emotion, arguing that conscience is best seen in terms of the function it serves in moderating the moral emotions of shame, guilt and pride.

In the mid-eighteenth century metaphysics was broadly understood as the study of three areas of philosophical thought: theology, psychology and cosmology. This book examines the fortunes of the third of these formidable metaphysical concepts, the world.Sean Gaston provides a clear and concise account of the concept of world from the mid-eighteenth century to the end of the twentieth century, exploring its possibilities and limitations and engaging with current issues in politics and ecology. He focuses on the work of five principal thinkers: Kant, Hegel, Husserl, Heidegger and Derrida, all of whom attempt to establish new grounds for seeing the world as a whole. Gaston presents a critique of the self-evident use of the concept of world in philosophy and asks whether one can move beyond the need for a world-like vantage point to maintain a concept of world. From Kant to the present day this concept has been a problem for philosophy and it remains to be seen if we need a new Copernican revolution when it comes to the concept of world.

Affective Critical Regionality offers a new approach to developing a sharper, more nuanced understanding of the relations between place, space, memory and affect. It builds on the author's extensive work on the American West, where he developed the idea of ';expanded critical regionalism' to underline the West as multiple, dynamic and relational; engaged in global / local processes, tensions between the rooted and the routed, and increasingly as relevant to debates around the politics of precarity and vulnerability. This book uses affective critical regionality to enable a re-valuing of the local as a powerful means to appreciate the everyday and the over-looked as vital elements within a more inclusive understanding of how we live. Exploring a variety of cultural materials including fiction, memoir, theory, poetry and film it demonstrates how this approach can deepen our understanding of, and simultaneously provoke new relations with, place. Moving beyond the US context through its use of international theoretical voices and texts, it will show how the concept is applicable to other cultural spheres.

Posthuman Urbanism explores what it means to live in an urban environment with reference to posthuman theory. The book argues that contemporary science and technology offers radically different ways for changing the way we live in city spaces today.