forerunners: ideas first 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.
Illness Politics and Hashtag Activism Lisa Diedrich
Diedrich shows how illness- and disabilityoriented hashtags serve as portals into how and why illness and disability are sites of political struggle and how illness politics is informed by, intersects with, and sometimes stands in for sexual, racial, and class politics. She argues that illness politics is central to both mainstream and radical politics, and she investigates the dynamic intersection of media and health and health-activist practices to show the ways their confluence affects our perception and understanding of illness. UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA PRESS March 2024 6 black and white illustrations 150pp 9781517917340 £9.00 PB
Everything is Police Tia Trafford
How institutional and interpersonal policing have been central to worldmaking Policing is constitutive of colonial modernity: normalizing, internalizing, and legalizing antiBlack violence as the ongoing condition for white life and freedom. The result, Tia Trafford argues here, is a situation where we cannot practically experience or even imagine worlds free from policing. From the plantation to the prison, global apartheid, and pandemic control, this book examines why and how policing has become the most ingrained, commonsense— and insidious—way of managing our world. UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA PRESS February 2024 112pp 9781517916862 £9.00 PB
On the Appearance of the World
A Future for Aesthetics in Architecture Mark Foster Gage How can architecture develop better aesthetic directions for the twenty-first-century built environment? Our world, increasingly defined by efficient but unconsidered architecture and cities, seems to be getting uglier. In On the Appearance of the World, Mark Foster Gage asks why. He imagines a future scenario where architectural design and ideas from aesthetic philosophy align toward the production of a built world that is more humane, habitable, beautiful, and just. UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA PRESS February 2024 80pp 9781517917289 £9.00 PB
Livestreaming
An Aesthetics and Ethics of Technical Encounter EL Putnam Livestreaming is ubiquitous in our Covid-19inflected era. In this book, EL Putnam takes up the implications of this technology, arguing that livestreamed internet broadcasts perform aesthetic and ethical encounters that invite distinctive means of relating to others. Treating humans and technologies as inherently relational, Putnam considers how livestreaming constitutes new patterns of being together that are complex, ambivalent, and transformative. Understood in such a way, we see how livestreaming exceeds quantifying and calculating metrics, challenges emphasis on content generation, and introduces an entirely new means of social engagement. UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA PRESS January 2024 98pp 9781517917098 £9.00 PB
No More Fossils Dominic Boyer
In No More Fossils, Dominic Boyer tells the story of the rise of fossil civilization through successive phases of sucropolitics (plantation sugar), carbopolitics (industrial coal), and petropolitics (oily automobility and plasticity), showing what tethers us to the ecocidal trajectory of petroculture today and what it will take to overcome the forces that mire us in place. He also looks ahead toward the world that the rapid electrification of vehicles, buildings, and power is creating. What can we do to make electroculture more just and sustainable than the petroculture we are leaving behind? UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA PRESS October 2023 108pp 9781517916367 £9.00 PB
Opening Ceremony
Inviting Inclusion into University Governance Kathryn J. Gindlesparger University shared governance is a microcosm of regulation and thrives particularly on ceremony to communicate its relevance. While many investigations of university governance examine representation, Opening Ceremony offers that, instead, stakeholders’ belief in institutional values can invite revision of stagnant governance practices. Governance tells us what the rules are, but they also tell us how to feel: opening up the ceremonial communication of this system invites new participants to rewrite how universities respond to felt needs. UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA PRESS August 2023 96pp 9781517915926 £9.00 PB
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Gramsci at Sea Sharad Chari
How might an oceanic Gramsci speak to Black aquafuturism and other forms of oceanic critique? This succinct work reads Antonio Gramsci’s writings on the sea, focused in his prison notes on waves of imperial power in the inter-war oceans of his time. Sharad Chari argues that the imprisoned militant’s method is oceanic in form, and that this oceanic Marxism can attend to the roil of sociocultural dynamics, to waves of imperial power, as well as to the capacity of Black, Drexciyan, and other forms of oceanic critique to “storm” us on different shores.
UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA PRESS August 2023 106pp 9781517915919 £9.00 PB
Burgers in Blackface
Anti-Black Restaurants Then and Now Naa Oyo A. Kwate Aunt Jemima is the face of pancake mix. Uncle Ben sells rice. Chef Rastus shills for Cream of Wheat. Stereotyped Black faces and bodies have long promoted retail food products that are household names. Much less visible to the public are the numerous restaurants that deploy unapologetically racist logos, themes, and architecture. These marketing concepts, which center nostalgia for a racist past and commemoration of our racist present, reveal the deeply entrenched American investment in antiblackness. Drawing on wide-ranging sources from the late 1800s to the present, Burgers in Blackface gives a powerful account, and rebuke, of historical and contemporary racism in restaurant branding.
UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA PRESS July 2019 96pp 9781517908027 £9.00 PB
Crip Negativity J. Logan Smilges
In the thirty years since the Americans with Disabilities Act was signed into law, the lives of disabled people have not improved nearly as much as activists and politicians had hoped. In Crip Negativity, J. Logan Smilges shows us what’s gone wrong and what we can do to fix it. Leveling a strong critique of the category of disability and liberal disability politics, Smilges asks and imagines what horizons might exist for the liberation of those oppressed by ableism— beyond access and inclusion. Inspired by models of negativity in queer studies, Black studies, and crip theory, Smilges proposes that bad crip feelings might help all of us to care gently for one another, even as we demand more from the world than we currently believe to be possible. UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA PRESS
Health Colonialism
Urban Wastelands and Hospital Frontiers Shiloh Krupar Here, Shiloh Krupar investigates the racially inequitable effects of elite U.S. hospitals on their surrounding neighborhoods and their role in consolidating frontiers of land primed for redevelopment. Naming this frontier “medical brownfields,” Krupar shows how hospitals leverage their domestic real estate empires to underwrite international prospecting for patients and overseas services and specialty clinics. Her pointed analysis reveals that decolonizing health care efforts must scrutinize the land practices of nonprofit medical institutions and the liberal foundations of medical apartheid perpetuated by globalizing American health care.
UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA PRESS April 2023 110pp 9781517915421 £9.00 PB
June 2023 106pp 9781517915582 £9.00 PB
All through the Town
Endlings
Everyone knows the yellow school bus. It’s been invisible and also omnipresent for a century. Antero Garcia shows how the U.S. school bus, its form unaltered for decades, is the most substantial piece of educational technology to ever shape how schools operate. As it noisily moves young people across the country every day, the bus offers the opportunity for a necessary reexamination of what “counts” as educational technology. Particularly in light of these buses being idled in pandemic times, All through the Town questions what we take for granted and what we overlook in public schooling in America, pushing for liberatory approaches to education that extend beyond notions of school equity.
An endling is the last known individual of a species; when that individual dies, the species becomes ex�nct. These “last individuals" are poignant characters in the stories that humans tell themselves about today's Anthropocene. In this evoca�ve work, Lydia Pyne explores how discussion about endlings—how we tell their histories—draws on deep tradi�ons of storytelling across a variety of narra�ve types that go well beyond the science of these species' biology or their evolu�onary history. Endlings provides a useful and though�ul discussion of species concepts: how species start and how (and why) they end, what it means to be a “charisma�c" species, the effects of rewilding, and what makes species ex�nc�on different in this era. From Benjamin the thylacine to Celia the ibex to Lonesome George the Galápagos tortoise, endlings, Pyne shows, have the power to shape how we think about grief, mourning, and loss amid the world's sixth mass ex�nc�on.
The School Bus as Educational Technology Antero Garcia
UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA PRESS February 2023 100pp 9781517915650 £9.00 PB
Fables for the Anthropocene Lydia Pyne
UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA PRESS August 2022 106pp 9781517914837 £9.00 PB
Rescue Me
On Dogs and Their Humans Margret Grebowicz This is a li�le book about the oldest rela�onship we humans have cul�vated with another large animal—in something like the original interspecies space, as old or older than any other prac�ce that might be called human. But it’s also about the role of this rela�onship in the a�ri�on of life—especially social life—in late capitalism. As we become more and more obsessed with imagining ourselves as benevolent rescuers of dogs, it is increasingly clear that it is dogs who are rescuing us. But from what? And toward what? Exploring adop�on, work, food, and training, this book considers the social as fundamentally more-than-human and argues that the future belongs to dogs—and the humans they are pulling along.
UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA PRESS August 2022 80pp 9781517914608 £9.00 PB
Studious Drift
Movements and Protocols for a Postdigital Education Peter Hyland & Tyson E. Lewis The global pandemic has underscored contemporary reliance on digital environments. This is par�cularly true among schools and universi�es, which, in response, shi�ed much of their instruc�on online. Because the rise of e-learning logics, ed-tech industries, and enterprise learning-management systems all threaten to further commodify and instrumentalize higher educa�on, these technologies and pla�orms have to be crea�vely and cri�cally struggled over. Studious Dri� intervenes in this struggle by reviving the rela�onship between studying and the genera�ve space of the studio in service of advancing educa�onal experimenta�on for a world where digital tools have become a permanent part of educa�on. Drawing on Alfred Jarry’s pataphysics, the “science of imaginary solu�ons,” it reveals how the studio is a space-�me machine capable of traveling beyond the limits of conven�onal online learning to redefine educa�on as interdisciplinary, experimental, public study.
UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA PRESS July 2022 98pp 9781517913212 £9.00 PB
The School-Prison Trust
Sabina E. Vaught, Bryan McKinley Jones Brayboy & Chin Jeremiah The School–Prison Trust describes interrelated histories, ongoing ideologies, and contemporary expressions of what the authors call the “school–prison trust”: a conquest strategy encompassing the boarding school and juvenile prison models, and deployed in the long war against Na�ve peoples. At its heart, the book is a constella�on of stories of Indigenous self-determina�on in the face of this ongoing conquest. Following the stories of an incarcerated young man named Jakes, the authors consider features of school– prison rela�ons for young Na�ve people to ask urgent ques�ons about Indigenous sovereignty, conquest, survivance, and refusal.
UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA PRESS July 2022 142pp 9781517914264 £9.00 PB
Does the Earth Care?
Indifference, Providence, and Provisional Ecology Mick Smith & Jason Young The world is changing. Progress no longer has a future but any earlier sense of Earth as “providen�al” seems of merely historical interest. The apparent absence of Earthly solicitude is a symptom and consequence of these successive Western modes of engagement with the Earth, now exemplified in global capitalism. Within these constructs, Earth can only appear as cons�tu�vely indifferent to the fate of all its inhabitants. The “provisional ecology” outlined in Does the Earth Care?— drawing on a variety of literary and philosophical sources from Richard Jefferies and Robert Macfarlane to Mar�n Heidegger and Gaia theory—fundamentally challenges that assump�on, while offering an Earthly alterna�ve to either cold realism or alienated despair in the face of impending ecological disaster.
UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA PRESS June 2022 132pp 9781517913205 £9.00 PB
Solarities
Seeking Energy Justice Edited by Ayesha Vemuri & Darin Barney Solari�es considers the possibili�es of organizing socie�es and economies around solar energy, and the challenges of a just and equitable transi�on away from fossil fuels. Far from presen�ng solarity as a utopian solu�on to the climate crisis, it cri�cally examines the ambiguous poten�als of solari�es: plural, situated, and o�en contradictory. Here, a diverse collec�ve of ac�vists, scholars, and prac��oners cri�cally engage a wide range of rela�onships and orienta�ons to the sun. They consider the material and infrastructural dimensions of solar power, the decolonial and feminist promises of decentralized energy, solarian rela�ons with more-thanhuman kin, and the problem of oppressive and weaponized solari�es. Solari�es imagines—and demands— possibili�es for energy jus�ce in this transi�on.
UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA PRESS May 2022 1 black and white illustra�on 92pp 9781517914141 £9.00 PB
The Owls Are Not What They Seem Artist as Ethologist Arnaud Gerspacher
The Owls Are Not What They Seem is a selec�ve history of modern and contemporary engagements with animals in the visual arts and how these explora�ons relate to the evolu�on of scien�fic knowledge regarding animals. Arnaud Gerspacher argues that ar�s�c knowledge, with its experimental nature, ability to contain contradic�ons, and more capacious understanding of truth-claims, presents a valuable supplement to scien�fic knowledge when it comes to encountering and exis�ng alongside nonhuman animals and life worlds. Though cri�cal of art works involving animals that are unreflec�ve and exploita�ve, Gerspacher’s explora�on of aesthe�c prac�ces by Allora & Calzadilla, Pierre Huyghe, Agnieszka Kurant, Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook, Mar�n Roth, David Weber-Krebs, and others suggests that, alongside scien�fic prac�ces, art has much to offer in revealing the otherworldly quali�es of animals and forging ecopoli�cal solidari�es with fellow earthlings.
UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA PRESS May 2022 112pp 9781517913564 £9.00 PB
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 £9.00 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. Only a Black Athlete Can Save Us Now 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 £9.00 PB
The World Is Gone
Philosophy in Light of the Pandemic Gregg Lambert Exploring the existen�al implica�ons of the Covid19 crisis through medita�ons. 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 £9.00 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 £9.00 PB
Young-Girls in Echoland
#Theorizing Tiqqun Andrea Jonsson & Heather WarrenCrow 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-and-response of pop philosophy and for hearing the affec�ve rhythms of communica�ve capitalism.
UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA PRESS December 2021 126pp 9781517913021 £9.00 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 £9.00 PB
The Global Shelter Imaginary
Virtue Hoarders
Prompted by a growing number of refugees and other displaced people, intersec�ons of design and humanitarianism are prolifera�ng. From the IKEA Founda�on’s Be�er Shelter to Airbnb’s Open Homes program, the consumer economy has engaged the global refugee crisis with seemingly new tac�cs that normalize an ins�tu�onally sanc�oned poli�cs of evasion. Exploring “the global shelter imaginary,” this book charts the ways shelter func�ons as a form of rightless relief that expels recogni�on of the rights of the displaced and advances poli�cal paradoxes of displacement itself.
A denuncia�on of the creden�aled elite class that serves capitalism while insis�ng on its own progressive heroism. Professional Managerial Class (PMC) elite workers labor in a world of performa�ve iden�ty and virtue signaling, publicizing an ability to do ordinary things in fundamentally superior ways. Author Catherine Liu shows how the PMC stands in the way of social jus�ce and economic redistribu�on by promo�ng meritocracy, philanthropy, and other selfserving opera�ons to abet an individualist path to a be�er world. Virtue Hoarders is an unapologe�cally polemical call to reject making a virtue out of taste and consump�on habits. UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA PRESS
Ikea Humanitarianism and Rightless Relief Andrew Herscher & Daniel Bertrand Monk
UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA PRESS September 2021 96pp 9781517912222 £9.00 PB
The Case against the Professional Managerial Class Catherine Liu
Series: Forerunners: Ideas First January 2021 90pp 9781517912253 £9.00 PB
The Problem of the Negro as a Problem for Gender
Grounded
A deep medita�on on and expansion of the figure of the Negro and insurrec�onary effects of the “X" as theorized by Nahum Chandler, The Problem of the Negro as a Problem for Gender thinks through the problema�zing effects of blackness as, too, a problema�zing of gender. Through the paraontological, the between, and the figure of the “X" (with its explicit contemporary link to nonbinary and trans genders) Marquis Bey presents a medita�on on black feminism and gender nonnorma�vity. Chandler's text serves as both an argumenta�ve tool for rendering the “radical alterna�ve" in and as blackness as well as demonstra�ng the necessarily trans/gendered valences of that radical alterna�ve.
Considers the �me leading up to the COVID-19 pandemic and the ensuing global plummet in commercial flight. Mobility studies scholar Christopher Schaberg tours the newly opened airport terminal outside of New Orleans (MSY) in late 2019, and goes on to survey the broad cultural landscape of empty airports and grounded planes in the early months of the novel coronavirus’s spread in 2020. The book culminates in a reflec�on on the future of air travel: what may unfold, and what parts of commercial flight are almost certainly relics of the past. Grounded blends journalis�c reportage with cultural theory and philosophical inquiry in order to offer graspable insights as well as a s�nging cri�que of contemporary air travel.
Marquis Bey
UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA PRESS December 2020 96pp 9781517911959 £9.00 PB
Perpetual Flight . . . and Then the Pandemic Christopher Schaberg
UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA PRESS December 2020 92pp 9781517912024 £9.00 PB
Cruelty as Citizenship
Trans Care
More than a decade before the elec�on of Donald Trump, vitriolic and dehumanizing rhetoric against migrants was already part of the na�onal conversa�on. Situa�ng the contemporary debate on immigra�on within America's history of indigenous dispossession, cha�el slavery, the Mexican-American War, and Jim Crow, Cris�na Beltrán reveals white supremacy to be white democracy—a par�cipatory prac�ce of racial violence, domina�on, and exclusion that gave white ci�zens the right to both wield and exceed the law. S�ll, Beltrán sees cause for hope in growing movements for migrant and racial jus�ce.
What does it mean for trans people to show up for one another, to care deeply for one another? How have failures of care shaped trans lives? What care prac�ces have trans subjects and communi�es cul�vated in the wake of widespread transphobia and systemic forms of trans exclusion? Trans Care is a cri�cal interven�on in how care labor and care ethics have been thought, arguing that dominant modes of conceiving and cri�quing the poli�cs and distribu�on of care entrench norma�ve and cis-centric familial structures and gendered arrangements. A serious considera�on of trans survival and flourishing requires a radical rethinking of how care operates. UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA PRESS
How Migrant Suffering Sustains White Democracy Cristina Beltrán
UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA PRESS October 2020 136pp 9781517911928 £9.00 PB
Hil Malatino
September 2020 72pp 9781517911188 £9.00 PB
Kill the Overseer!
Wageless Life
Profiles and problema�zes digital games that depict Atlan�c slavery and “gamify” slave resistance. In videogames emphasizing planta�on labor, the player may choose to commit small acts of resistance like tool-breaking or working slowly. Others drama�cally stage the slave’s choice to flee enslavement and journey northward, and some depict outright violent revolt against the master and his apparatus. In this work, Sarah Juliet Lauro ques�ons whether the reduc�on of a historical enslaved person to a digital commodity in games such as Mission US, Assassin’s Creed, and Freedom Cry ought to trouble us as a further commodifica�on of slavery’s vic�ms, or whether these interac�ve experiences offer an empowering commemora�on of the history of slave resistance.
To live in this world is to be condi�oned by capital. Once paired with Western democracy, unfe�ered capitalism has led to a shrinking economic system that squeezes out billions of people—crea�ng a planet of surplus popula�ons. Wageless Life is a manifesto for building a future beyond the toxic failures of late-stage capitalism. Daring to imagine new social rela�ons, new modes of economic existence, and new collec�ve worlds, the authors provide skills and tools for perceiving—and living in— a post-capitalist future. “This lucid and penetra�ng study not only lays bare the cri�cal features of our decaying social order and its historical roots, but also provides valuable guidelines for the task of ‘seizing our autonomy back’ in a world of jus�ce, freedom, communal life, and human dignity. Percep�ve and enlightening, and a ray of light in dark �mes.”
The Gamification of Slave Resistance Sarah Juliet Lauro
UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA PRESS August 2020 100pp 9781517911003 £9.00 PB
A Manifesto for a Future beyond Capitalism Ian G. R. Shaw & Marv Waterstone
— Noam Chomsky
UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA PRESS December 2019 142pp 9781517909260 £9.00 PB
How to Do Things with Sensors Jennifer Gabrys
Sensors are increasingly common within ci�zensensing and DIY projects, but these devices o�en require the use of a how-to guide. From online instruc�onal videos for troubleshoo�ng sensor installa�ons to handbooks for using and abusing the Internet of Things, the how-to genres and formats of digital instruc�on con�nue to expand and develop. As the how-to proliferates, and instruc�ons unfold through mul�ple aspects of technoscien�fic prac�ces, Jennifer Gabrys asks why the how-to has become one of the prevailing genres of the digital. How to Do Things with Sensors explores the ways in which things are made do-able with and through sensors and further considers how worlds are made sense-able and ac�onable through the instruc�onal mode of ci�zen-sensing projects.
UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA PRESS August 2019 106pp 9781517908317 £9.00 PB
Theory for the World to Come Speculative Fiction and Apocalyptic Anthropology Matthew J. Wolf-Meyer
The future has become increasingly difficult to imagine. We might be able to predict a few events, but imagining how looming disasters will coincide is simultaneously necessary and impossible. Drawing on specula�ve fic�on and social theory, Theory for the World to Come is the beginning of a conversa�on about theories that move beyond nihilis�c concep�ons of the capitalism-caused Anthropocene and toward genera�ve bodies of thought that provoke crea�ve ways of thinking about the world ahead. Ma�hew J. Wolf-Meyer draws on such authors as Kim Stanley Robinson and Octavia Butler, and engages with afrofuturism, indigenous specula�ve fic�on, and films from the 1970s and ’80s to help think differently about the future and its possibili�es. UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA PRESS April 2019 116pp 9781517907808 £9.00 PB
A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None
The End of Man
No geology is neutral, writes Kathryn Yusoff. Tracing the color line of the Anthropocene, A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None examines how the grammar of geology is founda�onal to establishing the extrac�ve economies of subjec�ve life and the earth under colonialism and slavery. Yusoff ini�ates a transdisciplinary conversa�on between feminist black theory, geography, and the earth sciences, addressing the poli�cs of the Anthropocene within the context of race, materiality, deep �me, and the a�erlives of geology. “Yusoff’s A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None charts and unearths the grammar of geology as one that is founda�onal to and enabling of the extrac�ve economies and histories of colonialism and slavery.”
Where the Anthropocene has become linked to an apocalyp�c narra�ve, and where this narra�ve carries a widespread escapist belief that salva�on will come from a supernatural elsewhere, Joanna Zylinska has a different take. The End of Man rethinks the prophecy of the end of humans, interroga�ng the rise in populism around the world and offering an ethical vision of a “feminist counterapocalypse,” which challenges many of the masculinist and technicist solu�ons to our planetary crises. The book is accompanied by a short photo-film, Exit Man, which ul�mately asks: If unbridled progress is no longer an op�on, what kinds of coexistences and collabora�ons do we create in its a�ermath?
Kathryn Yusoff
— Eye on Design
UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA PRESS November 2018 130pp 9781517907532 £9.00 PB
A Feminist Counterapocalypse Joanna Zylinska
UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA PRESS March 2018 78pp 9781517905590 £9.00 PB
A Third University Is Possible la paperson
A Third University is Possible unravels the in�mate rela�onship between the more than 200 US land grant ins�tu�ons, American se�ler colonialism, and contemporary university expansion. Author la paperson cracks open uncanny connec�ons between Indian boarding schools, Black educa�on, and missionary schools in Kenya; and between the Department of Homeland Security and the University of California. Central to la paperson’s discussion is the “scyborg,” a decolonizing agent of technological subversion. Drawing parallels to Third Cinema and Black filmmaking assemblages, A Third University is Possible ul�mately presents new ways of using language to develop a framework for hotwiring university “machines” to the prac�cal work of decoloniza�on.
UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA PRESS
The Politics of Bitcoin
Software as Right-Wing Extremism David Golumbia Since its introduc�on in 2009, Bitcoin has been widely promoted as a digital currency that will revolu�onize everything from online commerce to the na�on-state. Yet supporters of Bitcoin and its blockchain technology subscribe to a form of cyberlibertarianism that depends to a surprising extent on far-right poli�cal thought. The Poli�cs of Bitcoin exposes how much of the economic and poli�cal thought on which this cryptocurrency is based emerges from ideas that travel the gamut, from Milton Friedman, F.A. Hayek, and Ludwig von Mises to Federal Reserve conspiracy theorists.
UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA PRESS September 2016 100pp 9781517901806 £9.00 PB
June 2017 100pp 9781517902087 £9.00 PB
Dark Deleuze
No Speed Limit
Andrew Culp
French philosopher Gilles Deleuze is known as a thinker of crea�on, joyous affirma�on, and rhizoma�c assemblages. In this short book, Andrew Culp polemically argues that this once-radical canon of joy has lost its resistance to the present. Concepts created to defeat capitalism have been recycled into business mantras that joyously affirm “Power is ver�cal; poten�al is horizontal!” Culp recovers the Deleuze’s forgo�en nega�vity. He unse�les the prevailing interpreta�on through an underground network of references to conspiracy, cruelty, the terror of the outside, and the shame of being human. Ul�mately, he rekindles opposi�on to what is intolerable about this world. “Dark Deleuze is an important contribu�on to Deleuze scholarship—and to radical poli�cal thought.” — Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory
Three Essays on Accelerationism Steven Shaviro Accelera�onism is the bastard offspring of a fur�ve liaison between Marxism and science fic�on. Its basic premise is that the only way out is the way through: to get beyond capitalism, we need to push its technologies to the point where they explode. This may be dubious as a poli�cal strategy, but it works as a powerful ar�s�c program. Other authors have debated the pros and cons of accelera�onist poli�cs; No Speed Limit makes the case for an accelera�onist aesthe�cs. Our present moment is illuminated, both for good and for ill, in the cracked mirror of science-fic�onal futurity.
UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA PRESS January 2015 60pp 9780816697670 £9.00 PB
UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA PRESS June 2016 90pp 9781517901332 £9.00 PB
The Anthrobscene Jussi Parikka
Smartphones, laptops, tablets, and e-readers all at one �me held the promise of a more environmentally healthy world not dependent on paper and deforesta�on. The result of our ubiquitous digital lives is, as we see in The Anthrobscene, actually quite the opposite: not ecological health but an environmental wasteland, where media never die. Jussi Parikka cri�ques corporate and human desires as a geophysical force, analyzing the material side of the earth as essen�al for the existence of media and introducing the no�on of an alterna�ve deep �me in which media live on in the layer of toxic waste we will leave behind as our geological legacy. UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA PRESS October 2014 60pp 9780816696079 £8.00 PB
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