Forerunners: Ideas First
Short books of thought-in-process scholarship, where intense analysis, questioning, and speculation take the lead
Books in this Series
Studious Drift
What kind of university is possible when digital tools are not taken for granted, but hacked for a more experimental future?
Out of Breath
Explores the intrinsic relation of life to air, and breathing, through contemporary art
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 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
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?
Kill the Overseer!
Explores the representation of slave revolt in video games—and the trouble with making history playable
Furious Feminisms
A provocative peek into this complicated film as a space for subversion, activism, and imaginative power
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
Burgers in Blackface
A powerful account, and rebuke, of historical and contemporary racism in restaurant branding
The Swindle of Innovative Educational Finance
How “innovative” finance schemes skim public wealth while hijacking public governance
Edges of the State
Using philosophical and scientific work to engage the perennial question of human nature
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
Aspirational Fascism
Coming to terms with a new period of uncertainty when it is still replete with possibilities
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
Ten Theses for an Aesthetics of Politics
Reckoning the unsettled relationship between aesthetics and 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?
No Speed Limit
Proposes a vision of survival and flourishing in the face of economic and environmental catastrophe
The Anthrobscene
Critiques the environmental destruction caused by media technologies in the anthropocene era
The School-Prison Trust
Considers colonial school–prison systems in relation to the self-determination of Native communities, nations, and peoples