Forerunners
Forerunners is a thought-in-process series of breakthrough digital works, published by the University of Minnesota Press. Written between fresh ideas and finished books, Forerunners draws on scholarly work initiated in notable blogs, social media, conference plenaries, journal articles, and the synergy of academic exchange. This is gray literature publishing: where intense thinking, change, and speculation take place in scholarship. Out of Breath
Vulnerability of Air in Contemporary Art Caterina Albano Examines the cultural significance of breath and air to a wide array of forces in our midst, including economy, poli�cs, infec�on, and ecological violence. Through a considera�on of recent art prac�ces and projects, including the dance project Breath Catalogue, which makes visible the breathing pa�erns of dancers, and Forensic Architecture’s Cloud Studies video, which inves�gates eight different kinds of clouds from airstrikes to herbicides to tear gas, Albano focuses on breath as both an intui�ve process and a conveyer of meanings. Conceived in response to the Covid-19 pandemic and systemic inequali�es that it has laid bare, Out of Breath shows the poten�al of ar�s�c prac�ces to mobilize affect as a form of cultural and poli�cal cri�que.
University of Minnesota Press March 2022 96pp 9781517913557 £8.00 PB
Only a Black Athlete Can Save Us Now Grant Farred
Star�ng with the refusal of George Hill of the Milwaukee Bucks to par�cipate in an August 2020 playoff game following the shoo�ng of Jacob Blake by police in Kenosha, Wisconsin, Grant Farred shows how the Covid-restricted NBA “bubble” released an energy that spurred athletes into radical ac�on. They disrupted athle�c normalcy, and in their grief and rage against American racism they demonstrated the true progressivism lacking in even the most reformist-minded poli�cians and pundits. Farred goes on to trace the radicalism of black athletes in a number of sports, including the WNBA, women’s tennis, the NFL, and NASCAR, loca�ng contemporary athletes in a lineage that runs through Muhammad Ali as well as Tommy Smith and John Carlos at the 1968 Olympics. Uses sport as a point of departure to argue that the dystopic crisis of our current moment offers a singular opportunity to reimagine how we live in the world.
University of Minnesota Press February 2022 130pp 9781517913373 £8.00 PB
The World Is Gone
Philosophy in Light of the Pandemic Gregg Lambert Part personal memoir, part philosophical reflec�on and wri�en in the midst of the pandemic in 2021, The World Is Gone employs the Robinson Crusoe fable to launch an existen�al inves�ga�on of the effects of extreme isola�on, profound boredom, nightly insomnia, and the fear of madness associated with the loss of a world populated by others.
University of Minnesota Press February 2022 114pp 9781517913380 £8.00 PB
Safety Orange
Anna Watkins Fisher Safety Orange first emerged in the 1950s as a bureaucra�c color standard in technical manuals and federal regula�ons in the United States. Today it is most visible in the contexts of terror, pandemic, and environmental alarm systems; traffic control; work safety; and mass incarcera�on. In recent decades, the color has become ubiquitous in American public life—a marker of the extreme poles of state oversight and abandonment, of capitalist excess and derelic�on. Its unprecedented satura�on encodes the tracking of those bodies, neighborhoods, and infrastructures judged as worthy of care—and those deemed dangerous and expendable. Here, Anna Watkins Fisher uses Safety Orange as an interpre�ve key for theorizing the uneven distribu�on of safety and care in twenty-firstcentury U.S. public life and for pondering what the color tells us about neoliberalism’s intensifying impact o�en hiding in plain sight in ordinary and commonplace phenomena.
University of Minnesota Press January 2022 98pp 9781517913397 £8.00 PB
Young-Girls in Echoland
#Theorizing Tiqqun Andrea Jonsson & Heather WarrenCrow Tiqqun’s Preliminary Materials for a Theory of the Young-Girl is a controversial work of an�capitalist philosophy that has a�racted musicians, playwrights, feminist theorists, and men's-rights ac�vists since its publica�on in 1999. More than twenty years a�er its publica�on the interna�onal reverbera�on of Young-Girls shows no signs of weakening. This book is a guide to this ongoing postdigital conversa�on, engaging with artworks and textual cri�cism provoked by Tiqqun’s audacious, arguably misogynis�c textual voice. Shows how Tiqqun’s polarizing figure has grown and matured but also stayed unapologe�cally girly in the works of ar�sts and scholars discussed here. Rethinking the myth of Echo and Narcissus by performing a different kind of listening, they take us on a journey from VSCO girls to basic bitches to vampires. Offers a model for analyzing the call-andresponse of pop philosophy and for hearing the affec�ve rhythms of communica�ve capitalism.
University of Minnesota Press December 2021 126pp 9781517913021 £8.00 PB
Calamity Theory
Three Critiques of Existential Risk Joshua Schuster & Derek Woods A new philosophical field has emerged. “Existen�al risk” studies any real or hypothe�cal human ex�nc�on event in the near or distant future. This movement examines catastrophes ranging from runaway global warming to nuclear warfare to malevolent ar�ficial intelligence, deploying a curious mix of u�litarian ethics, sta�s�cal risk analysis, and, controversially, a transhuman advocacy that would aim to supersede almost all ex�nc�on scenarios. The proponents of existen�al risk thinking, led by Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom, have seen their work gain immense popularity, a�rac�ng endorsement from Bill Gates and Elon Musk, millions of dollars, and millions of views. Calamity Theory is the first book to examine the rise of this thinking and its failures to acknowledge the ways some communi�es and lifeways are more at risk than others and what it implies about human ex�nc�on.
University of Minnesota Press November 2021 136pp 9781517912918 £8.00 PB