Janneke Adema: Living Books: Experiments in the Posthumanities (2021)

6 December 2021, dusan

“Reimagining the scholarly book as living and collaborative—not as commodified and essentialized, but in all its dynamic materiality.

In this book, Janneke Adema proposes that we reimagine the scholarly book as a living and collaborative project—not as linear, bound, and fixed, but as fluid, remixed, and liquid, a space for experimentation. She presents a series of cutting-edge experiments in arts and humanities book publishing, showcasing the radical new forms that book-based scholarly work might take in the digital age. Adema’s proposed alternative futures for the scholarly book go beyond such print-based assumptions as fixity, stability, the single author, originality, and copyright, reaching instead for a dynamic and emergent materiality.

Adema suggests ways to unbind the book, describing experiments in scholarly book publishing with new forms of anonymous collaborative authorship, radical open access publishing, and processual, living, and remixed publications, among other practices. She doesn’t cast digital as the solution and print as the problem; the problem in scholarly publishing, she argues, is not print itself, but the way print has been commodified and essentialized. Adema explores alternative, more ethical models of authorship; constructs an alternative genealogy of openness; and examines opportunities for intervention in current cultures of knowledge production. Finally, asking why it is that we cut and bind our research together at all, she examines two book publishing projects that experiment with remix and reuse and try to rethink and reperform the book-apparatus by taking responsibility for the cuts they make.”

Publisher MIT Press, August 2021
Leonardo series
Creative Commons BY-NC 4.0 International License
ISBN 9780262046022, 0262046024
xiii+335 pages

Interview with author: Erzsébet Tóth-Czifra (Dariah Open, 2021).

Publisher
WorldCat

HTML (on PubPub)
PDF
PDFs

Leigh Claire La Berge: Wages Against Artwork: Decommodified Labor and the Claims of Socially Engaged Art (2019)

7 February 2021, dusan

“The last twenty years have seen a rise in the production, circulation, and criticism of new forms of socially engaged art aimed at achieving social justice and economic equality. In Wages Against Artwork Leigh Claire La Berge shows how socially engaged art responds to and critiques what she calls decommodified labor—the slow diminishment of wages alongside an increase in the demands of work. Outlining the ways in which socially engaged artists relate to work, labor, and wages, La Berge examines how artists and organizers create institutions to address their own and others’ financial precarity; why the increasing role of animals and children in contemporary art points to the turn away from paid labor; and how the expansion of MFA programs and student debt helps create the conditions for decommodified labor. In showing how socially engaged art operates within and against the need to be paid for work, La Berge offers a new theorization of the relationship between art and contemporary capitalism.”

Publisher Duke University Press, Durham, NC, August 2019
ISBN 1478004231, 9781478004233
xiii+261 pages

Reviews: Noni Brynjolson (Field J), Lee Painter-Kim (Women’s Studies), Amber Taylor (E3W).

Interviews with author: Andreas Petrossiants (e-flux, 2018, podcast), Wen Zhuang (LA Review of Books, 2020), Andreas Petrossiants (Brooklyn Rail, 2020), Pierre d’Alancaisez (New Books Network, 2021, podcast).

Publisher
WorldCat

PDF (11 MB)
Internet Archive (multiple formats)

Stuart Hall: Conversations, Projects and Legacies (2017)

5 January 2021, dusan

This book “examines the career of the cultural studies pioneer, interrogating his influence and revealing lesser-known facets of his work. This collection of essays and photographs evaluates the legacies of his particular brand of cultural studies and demonstrates how other scholars and activists have utilised his thinking in their own research.

Throughout these pages, Hall’s colleagues and long-term collaborators assess his theoretical and methodological standpoints, his commitment to the development of a flexible form of revisionist Marxism, and the contributions of his specific mode of analysis to public debates on Thatcherism, neoliberalism and multiculturalism. North American activist Angela Davis argues that the model of politics, ideology, and race initially developed by Hall and his colleagues in Birmingham continues to resonate when applied to America’s racialized policing. Further essays focus on Hall’s contributions to contemporary political debate as well as questions of race, ethnicity, identity, migrancy and diaspora. Others discuss Hall’s continuing involvement in issues of representation and aesthetics in the visual arts, particularly photography and film.

With contributions from Britain, Europe, East Asia, and North and Latin America, Stuart Hall: Conversations, Projects and Legacies provides a comprehensive look at how, under Hall’s intellectual leadership, British cultural studies transformed itself from a form of ‘local’ knowledge to the international field of study we know today.”

Contributors: John Akomfrah, Avtar Brah, Charlotte Brunsdon, Iain Chambers, Kuan-Hsing Chen, John Clarke, James Curran, Angela Davis, David Edgar, Lawrence Grossberg, Catherine Hall, Dick Hebdige, Tony Jefferson, Robert Lumley, Mahasiddhi (Roy Peters), Doreen Massey, Angela McRobbie, Caspar Melville, Frank Mort, Michael Rustin, Bill Schwarz, Mark Sealy, Liv Sovik, Lola Young.

Edited by Julian Henriques and David Morley with Vana Goblot
Publisher Goldsmiths Press, London, 2017
ISBN 9781906897475, 1906897476
322 pages

Reviews: Ashleigh McFeeters (LSE blogs, 2018), Karen Wilkes (Media Theory, 2019).

Publisher
WorldCat

PDF (33 MB, updated on 2021-4-13)
PDF (12 MB, accepted manuscript)