Forerunners: Ideas First

Short books of thought-in-process scholarship, where intense analysis, questioning, and speculation take the lead.

About This Book

Overview

Books in this Series

Gramsci at Sea Exploring how the crisis of the world ocean is produced by capitalism and imperialism

Opening Ceremony Explores how university governance is restricted by ceremony and what it must do to survive

Crip Negativity Imagining anti-ableist liberation beyond the rubrics of access and inclusion

Health Colonialism The role of American hospital expansions in health disparities and medical apartheid

All through the Town The role of the humble school bus in transforming education in America

Rescue Me What exactly is it we want from dogs today?

Endlings Amid the historical decimation of species around the globe, a new way into the language of loss

The School-Prison Trust Considers colonial school–prison systems in relation to the self-determination of Native communities, nations, and peoples

Studious Drift What kind of university is possible when digital tools are not taken for granted, but hacked for a more experimental future?

Does the Earth Care? Rethinking our relationship with Earth in a time of environmental emergency

Out of Breath Explores the intrinsic relation of life to air, and breathing, through contemporary art

Solarities A collective engages and mirrors the critical need for energy justice and transformation

The Owls Are Not What They Seem Toward a posthumanist art and ethology

Only a Black Athlete Can Save Us Now A call to arms exploring the protest movements of 2020 as they reverberated through the athletic world

Safety Orange How fluorescent orange symbolizes the uneven distribution of safety and risk in the neoliberal United States

The World Is Gone Exploring the existential implications of the Covid-19 crisis through meditations

Calamity Theory What are the implications of how we talk about apocalypse?

Young-Girls in Echoland Who’s worse, the Young-Girl or the Man-Child?

The Global Shelter Imaginary Examines how the humanitarian order advances a message of moral triumph and care while abandoning the dispossessed

Virtue Hoarders A denunciation of the credentialed elite class that serves capitalism while insisting on its own progressive heroism

Theory for the World to Come Can social theories forge new paths into an uncertain future?

The Problem of the Negro as a Problem for Gender A complex articulation of the ways blackness and nonnormative gender intersect—and a deeper understanding of how subjectivities are formed

Grounded As commercial flight is changing dramatically and its future remains unclear, a look at how we got here

Cruelty as Citizenship Why are immigrants from Mexico and Latin America such an affectively charged population for political conservatives?

Trans Care A radical and necessary rethinking of trans care

Kill the Overseer! Explores the representation of slave revolt in video games—and the trouble with making history playable

Wageless Life Drawing up alternate ways to “make a living” beyond capitalism

Furious Feminisms A provocative peek into this complicated film as a space for subversion, activism, and imaginative power

LatinX Nationality is not enough to understand “Latin”-descended populations in the United States

Spoiler Alert All of this information at our fingertips—and we might not need any of it

Medical Technics A personal account of the aging body and advanced technologies by a preeminent philosopher of technology

Town Hall Meetings and the Death of Deliberation Tracing the erosion of democratic norms in the US and the conditions that make it possible

How to Do Things with Sensors An investigation of how-to guides for sensor technologies

Burgers in Blackface A powerful account, and rebuke, of historical and contemporary racism in restaurant branding

Against Aesthetic Exceptionalism Reconsiders exceptionalism between aesthetics and politics

Break Up the Anthropocene Takes the singular eco-catastrophic “Age of Man” and redefines this epoch

The Swindle of Innovative Educational Finance How “innovative” finance schemes skim public wealth while hijacking public governance

Learning versus the Common Core An open challenge to Common Core’s drive for uniformity

Edges of the State Using philosophical and scientific work to engage the perennial question of human nature

A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None Rewriting the “origin stories” of the Anthropocene

A Third University Is Possible Uncovering the decolonizing ghost in the colonizing machine

The Neocolonialism of the Global Village Uncovering a vast maze of realities in the media theories of Marshall McLuhan

Carceral Humanitarianism Considering the uneasy alliance between humanitarian aid, human rights, and military operations

The End of Man Debugging the Anthropocene’s insistence on apocalyptic tropes

Callous Objects Uncovering injustices built into our everyday surroundings

Aspirational Fascism Coming to terms with a new period of uncertainty when it is still replete with possibilities

Dark Deleuze Rekindling Deleuze’s opposition to what is intolerable about this world

UW Struggle A Wisconsin story that serves as a national warning

How Noise Matters to Finance The stock market is the background of how we begin to deal with the complex imbrication of humans, machines, and noise

Shareveillance Cracking open the politics of transparency and secrecy

The Celebrity Persona Pandemic Making sense of public identities, online and offline

Ten Theses for an Aesthetics of Politics Reckoning the unsettled relationship between aesthetics and politics

The Politics of Bitcoin The first comprehensive account of Bitcoin’s underlying right-wing politics

Fifty Years of The Battle of Algiers A fresh, important intervention into understanding our post-9/11 world

The Uberfication of the University The contemporary university’s implications for the future organization of labor

Digital Stockholm Syndrome in the Post-Ontological Age Rethinking the philosophical and anthropological basis of our ontology

Cinema without Reflection Excavates a theory of cinema in Derrida’s writing on love, narcissism, echopoiesis, and fluidity

Mandela’s Dark Years Inspired by one of Nelson Mandela’s recurring nightmares, Mandela’s Dark Years offers a political reading of dream-life

Martin Heidegger Saved My Life Could there be a bigger paradox than the black man using Martin Heidegger to repel the white woman's racism?

The Geek’s Chihuahua The evolution and meaning of our love affair with Apple and its devices

Deep Mapping the Media City Examines the material spaces in which our networks entangle themselves

No Speed Limit Proposes a vision of survival and flourishing in the face of economic and environmental catastrophe

Mediators Toward a theory of the city at the crossroads of aesthetics and politics

The Anthrobscene Critiques the environmental destruction caused by media technologies in the anthropocene era

Aesop’s Anthropology What can we learn about culture from other species?

No More Fossils Explores ecological impasses and opportunities of our fossil-fueled civilization

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Culture Machine: "We Have Always Been Artificially Intelligent" Interview with Joanna Zylinska The primary concern of my work over the recent years has been the constitution of the human as both a species and a historical subject.

T Magazine: What Does It Really Mean to Make Art? As the cultural critic Arne de Boever argues in Against Aesthetic Exceptionalism, the reverential way we speak about art invests the artist with a sovereignty akin to that of a monarch or even a god, unbound by the laws that rein in the rest of us.

Gender Jawn Podcast: Trans Care with Hil Malatino In this episode, the second on this year’s theme, Care for the Future, Gwendolyn Beetham and Tamir Williams speak with Hil Malatino about his books TRANS CARE and SIDE AFFECTS: ON BEING TRANS AND FEELING BAD.

Lean Out with Tara Henley: Conversation with Catherine Liu In our conversation today on the podcast, Liu touches on everything from mommy bloggers to land acknowledgements — and argues that we must insist on viewing society’s current struggles through an economic lens.

American Exception Podcast: Cancelling the PMC Aaron talks with Catherine Liu and Dan Kovalik about the Professional Managerial Class, "cancel culture," and US empire. Liu is a professor of Film & Media Studies at the University of California at Irvine and the author of Virtue Hoarders: The Case Against the Professional Managerial Class.

University of Minnesota Press

Forerunners: Ideas First

About This Book

Books in this Series

Related News