New from Our Distributed Presses! Keeping Autonomous Driving Alive, Still, Pina Bausch’s Dance Theater and More!
Our weekly list of new books is now available!
Keeping Autonomous Driving Alive
An Ethnography of Visions, Masculinity and Fragility
Göde Both
In Keeping Autonomous Driving Alive, Göde Both studies the relationships between researchers and artifacts held together by contested visions. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in a pioneering research project in Germany, he argues that we can make sense of technological visions only if we simultaneously grasp the role of care, gender, and narrative in sustaining technological research.
Still
Samuel Beckett’s Quietism
Andy Wimbush
In the 1930s, a young Samuel Beckett confessed to a friend that he had been living his life according to an ‘abject self-referring quietism’. Andy Wimbush argues that ‘quietism’—a philosophical and religious attitude of renunciation and will-lessness—is a key to understanding Beckett’s artistic vision and the development of his career as a fiction writer from his early novels Dream of Fair to Middling Women and Murphy to late short prose texts such as Stirrings Still and Company.
From the Balkan Politics and Society series
Nation Building in Contested States
Comparative Insights from Kosovo, Transnistria, and Northern Cyprus
Viktoria Potapkina
This study provides an overview of current nation building processes in contested states. With a specific focus on the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, Pridnestrovian Moldavian Republic, and Kosovo, original data is presented, collected in English in a single work for the first time.
Ambiguity Revisited
Communicating with Pictures
Stuart Franklin
Ambiguity Revisited is concerned with the manner in which pictures communicate with the spectator. Its focus lies in those fluid, indeterminate spaces where our reading of images, in art and photography, exercises and draws upon our imagination, memory, and experience.
Politics, Intellectuals, and Faith
Essays
Matthew Feldman. Edited by Archie Henderson
This wide-ranging collection of academic essays examines the various undertakings by modern intellectuals and ideologues in the process of propaganda and political debate. Matthew Feldman calls attention to the substantial role played in post-Great War Europe and the US by religions—both familiar monotheisms like Christianity and secular ‘political faiths’—over the last century of upheaval and revolutionary change
In Statu Nascendi Volume 3, No. 1 (2020)
Journal of Political Philosophy and International Relations
Edited by Piotr Pietrzak
In Statu Nascendi is a peer-reviewed journal that aspires to be a world-class scholarly platform encompassing original academic research dedicated to the circle of Political Philosophy, Cultural Studies, Theory of International Relations, Foreign Policy, and the political Decision-making process. The journal investigates specific issues through a socio-cultural, philosophical, and anthropological approach to raise a new type of civic awareness about the complexity of contemporary crisis, instability, and warfare situations, where the “stage-of-becoming” plays a vital role.
From the Lettre series
Fictions of Legibility
The Human Face and Body in Modern German Novels from Sophie von La Roche to Alfred Döblin
Gabriela Stoicea
Gabriela Stoicea examines how the incidence and role of physical descriptions in German novels changed between 1771 and 1929 in response to developments in the study of the human face and body. As well as engaging the tools and methods of literary analysis, the study uses a cultural studies approach to offer a constellation of ideas and polemics surrounding the readability of the human body.
From the Critical Dance Studies series
Pina Bausch’s Dance Theater
Company, Artistic Practices, and Reception
Gabriele Klein
This volume provides new, groundbreaking perspectives on the work of the Tanztheater Wuppertal and its iconic founder and artistic director—Pina Bausch. The company’s production development and performances, the global transfer of its choreographic material, and the baffled reactions of audiences and critics are explained as complex, interdependent, and reciprocal processes of translation.
From the Political Science series
Mediated Bordering
Eurosur, the Refugee Boat, and the Construction of an External EU Border
Sabrina Ellebrecht
The external border of the EU remains under permanent construction. Sabrina Ellebrecht engages with two of its primary building sites—the European Border Surveillance System (Eurosur) and the Refugee Boat. She analyzes how the function and quality of the EU’s current political border is crafted, shaped, produced and eventually stabilized through these two mediators.
From the Culture & Theory series
Imagined Economies—Real Fictions
New Perspectives on Economic Thinking in Great Britain
Edited by Jessica Fischer and Gesa Stedman
The contributions to this anthology take debates about the financial crisis, about recent austerity measures or about the Brexit referendum a step further. Each author identifies a facet of Britain’s imagined economies. They connect seemingly separate fields such as finance and fiction in order to better understand current political changes.
From the Culture & Theory series
Building Blocks
A Cultural History of Codes, Compositions, and Dispositions
Jose Muñoz Alvis
This study explores the historical implications of particular sets of building blocks in the interdisciplinary consolidation and transformation of techniques, materials, discourses, and subjects. By mapping the genealogy of building blocks from Fröbel’s gifts to their current systematization as interlocked blocks, this study proposes that building blocks should be understood not exclusively as concrete objects but as the materiality of a combinatorial program, which delineates a modular system characterized by a code of composition, context neutrality, and a semantic component.
