Across the humanities and the social sciences, “cultural analysis” is a vibrant research practice. Since its introduction in the 1990s, its main principles have remained largely the same: interdisciplinarity, political urgency, a heuristic use of concepts, the detailed analysis of objects of culture, and an awareness of the scholar’s situatedness in the present. But is the practice still suited to the spiraling of social, political, and environmental crises that mark our time? Drawing on e...

Awarded an Honourable Mention by the Association for Israeli Studies.Exploring the politics of the image in the context of Israeli militarized visual culture, Civic Aesthetics examines both the omnipresence of militarism in Israeli culture and society and the way in which this omnipresence is articulated, enhanced, and contested within local contemporary visual art. Looking at a range of contemporary artworks through the lens of “civilian militarism”, Roei employs the theo...

The question of what defines the human, and of what is human about the humanities, have been shaken up by the radical critiques of humanism and the displacement of anthropomorphism that have gained currency in recent years, propelled in part by rapid advances in our knowledge of living systems and of their genetic and algorithmic codes coupled with the global expansion of a knowledge-intensive capitalism.In Posthuman Knowledge, Rosi Braidotti takes a closer look at the imp...

"Not only an astute diagnosis of the confusions and contradictions of contemporary thought; it also offers compelling alternatives." —Rita Felski, author of Hooked: Art and AttachmentFor decades, scholars have been calling into question the universality of disciplinary objects and categories. The coherence of defined autonomous categories—such as religion, science, and art—has collapsed under the weight of postmodern critiques, calling into question the po...

Revisualising Intersectionality offers transdisciplinary interrogations of the supposed visual evidentiality of categories of human similarity and difference. This open-access book incorporates insights from social and cognitive science as well as psychology and philosophy to explain how we visually perceive physical differences and how cognition is fallible, processual, and dependent on who is looking in a specific context. Revisualising Intersectionality also puts into ...

Making Social Science Matter presents an exciting new approach to the social and behavioral sciences including theoretical argument, methodological guidelines, and examples of practical application. Why has social science failed in attempts to emulate natural science and produce normal theory? Bent Flyvbjerg argues that the strength of social sciences lies in its rich, reflexive analysis of values and power, essential to the social and economic development of any society. Richly informed, ...

This open access book examines from a variety of perspectives the disappearance of moral content and ethical judgment from the models employed in the formulation of modern economic theory, and some of the papers contain important proposals about how moral judgment could be reintroduced in economic theory. The chapters collected in this volume result from the favorable reception of the first volume of the Virtues in Economics series and represent further contributions to the themes set out ...

A leading philosopher of technology calls for the democratic coordination of technical rationality with everyday experience.The technologies, markets, and administrations of today's knowledge society are in crisis. We face recurring disasters in every domain: climate change, energy shortages, economic meltdown. The system is broken, despite everything the technocrats claim to know about science, technology, and economics. These problems are exacerbated by the fact ...

The modern university can trace its roots to Kant's call for enlightened self-determination, with education aiming to produce an informed and responsible body of citizens. As the university evolved, specialized areas of investigation emerged, enabling ever more precise research and increasingly nuanced arguments. In recent decades, however, challenges to the hegemony of disciplines have arisen, partly in response to a perceived need for the university to focus greater energy on its public ...

We live in a world of technical systems designed in accordance with technical disciplines and operated by personnel trained in those disciplines. This is a unique form of social organization that largely determines our way of life, but the actions of individuals and social protest still play a role in developing and purposing these rational systems. In Technosystem, Andrew Feenberg builds a theory of both the threats of technocratic modernity and the potential for democratic chang...

Using cultural anthropology to analyze debates that reverberate throughout the human sciences, George E. Marcus and Michael M. J. Fischer look closely at cultural anthropology's past accomplishments, its current predicaments, its future direction, and the insights it has to offer other fields of study. The result is a provocative work that is important for scholars interested in a critical approach to social science, art, literature, and history, as well as anthropology. This second editio...