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Beyond Civility: The Competing Obligations of Citizenship, by William Keith and Robert Danisch, Penn State University Press, 2020.
From the pundits to the polls, nearly everyone seems to agree that US politics have rarely been more fractious, and calls for a return to “civil discourse” abound. Yet it is also true that the requirements of polite discourse effectively silence those who are not in power, gaming the system against the disenfranchised. What, then, should a democracy do?
This book makes a case for understanding civility in a different light. Examining the history of the concept and its basis in communication and political theory, William Keith and Robert Danisch present a clear, robust analysis of civil discourse. Distinguishing it from politeness, they claim that civil argument must be redirected from the goal of political comity to that of building and maintaining relationships of minimal respect in the public sphere.
The Life of Words: Etymology and Modern Poetry, by David-Antoine Williams, Oxford University Press, 2020.
For centuries, investigations into the origins of words were entwined with investigations into the origins of humanity and the cosmos. With the development of modern etymological practice in the nineteenth century, however, many cherished etymologies were shown to be impossible, and the very idea of original 'true meaning' asserted in the etymology of 'etymology' declared a fallacy. Structural linguistics later held that the relationship between sound and meaning in language was 'arbitrary', or 'unmotivated', a truth that has survived with small modification until today. On the other hand, the relationship between sound and meaning has been a prime motivator of poems, at all times throughout history.
The Life of Words studies a selection of poets inhabiting our 'Age of the Arbitrary', whose auditory-semantic sensibilities have additionally been motivated by a historical sense of the language, troubled as it may be by claims and counterclaims of 'fallacy' or 'true meaning'. Arguing that etymology activates peculiar kinds of epistemology in the modern poem.
Nonaligned Modernism: Socialist Postcolonial Aesthetics in Yugoslavia, 1945-1985, by Bojana Videkanic, McGill-Queens University Press, 2020.
In less than half a century, the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia successfully defeated Fascist occupation, fended off dominating pressures from the Eastern and Western blocs, built a modern society on the ashes of war, created its own form of socialism, and led the formation of the Nonaligned Movement. This country's principles and its continued battles, fought against all odds, provided the basis for dynamic and exceptional forms of art.
Drawing on archival materials, postcolonial theory, and Eastern European socialist studies, Nonaligned Modernism chronicles the emergence of late modernist artistic practices in Yugoslavia from the end of the Second World War to the mid-1980s. Situating Yugoslav modernism within postcolonial artistic movements of the twentieth century, Bojana Videkanic explores how cultural workers collaborated with others from the Global South to create alternative artistic and cultural networks that countered Western hegemony. Videkanic focuses primarily on art exhibitions along with examples of international cultural exchange to demonstrate that nonaligned art wove together politics and aesthetics, and indigenous, Western, and global influences.
A Cultural History of Peace in Antiquity Volume 1, edited by Sheila Ager, Bloomsbury, 2020.
A Cultural History of Peace presents an authoritative survey from ancient times to the present. The set of six volumes covers over 2500 years of history, charting the evolving nature and role of peace throughout history.
This volume, A Cultural History of Peace in Antiquity, explores peace in the period from 500 BC to 800 AD. As with all the volumes in the illustrated Cultural History of Peace set, this volume presents essays on the meaning of peace, peace movements, maintaining peace, peace in relation to gender, religion and war and representations of peace. A Cultural History of Peace in Antiquity is the most authoritative and comprehensive survey available on peace in the classical era.
Fossilized: Environmental Policy in Canada's Petro-Provinces, by Angela Carter, UBC Press, 2020.
Canada’s largest oil-producing provinces underwent exceptional economic growth from 2005 to 2015. Yet oil’s economic miracle obscured its ecological costs. Fossilized traces this development trajectory, assessing how the governments of Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Newfoundland and Labrador offered extensive support for oil-industry development, and exploring the often downplayed environmental effects of extraction.
Angela Carter investigates overarching institutional trends, such as the restructuring of departments that prioritized extraction over environmental protection, and identifies regulatory inadequacies related to environmental assessment, land-use planning, and emissions controls. Her detailed analysis situates these policy dynamics within the historical and global context of late-stage petro-capitalism and deepening neoliberalization of environmental policy.
Capitalist Political Economy: Thinkers and Theories, by Heather Whiteside, Routledge, 2020.
Political economy recognizes and celebrates the many and varied interconnections between politics and economics in society, together with the economic implications of public policy and the political impact of market and property relations. As such, political economy is both an approach to understanding capitalism and a reflection of the forms and features of capitalism at particular moments. Grounded in primary and secondary literature including theorists’ original writings and leading literary biographies, this text explores principal themes in the development of capitalism and political economic thought. It relates these to markets, property, profits, labour, investment, innovation, the state, growth and crises, gender, the ecological limits of capital accumulation, and rival economic practices. The book contextualizes the legacy of foundational political economists by exploring their life and times and putting them in conversation with other highly influential theorists. Equally, it also considers more contemporary views.
Canadian Political Economy, edited by Heather Whiteside, University of Toronto Press, 2020.
In Canadian Political Economy, experts from a number of disciplinary backgrounds come together to explore Canada’s empirical political economy and the field's contributions to theory and debate. Considering both historical and contemporary approaches to CPE, the contributors pay particular attention to key actors and institutions, as well as developments in Canadian political-economic policies and practices, explored through themes of changes, crises, and conflicts in CPE. Offering up-to-date interpretations, analyses, and descriptions, Canadian Political Economy is accessibly written and suitable for students and scholars. In 17 chapters, the book’s topics include theory, history, inequality, work, free trade and fair trade, co-operatives, banking and finance, the environment, Indigeneity, and the gendered politics of political economy. Linking longstanding debates with current developments, this volume represents both a state-of-the-discipline and a state-of-the-art contribution to scholarship.
Disease, by Sarah Tolmie, Aqueduct Press, 2020.
Bodily life is an uneasy business. The terror of disease is a ubiquitous one. New diseases are being discovered all the time. This book collects twenty contemporary diseases—privacy, for example, or innovation, or involuntary compassion—and presents their primary symptoms and etiologies. It presents sufferers’ anecdotes: Owen wakes up one day made of glass. Deirdre is allergic to tourists. A middle-aged diabetic is haunted by the feet of a Kurdish refugee child. Apples develop a persistent tremor, and peanuts plot underground. Human resilience is tested in dramatic new ways in Disease.
The Fourth Island, by Sarah Tolmie, MacMillan, 2020.
Dark, mournful, and beautiful, Sarah Tolmie's The Fourth Island is a moving and unforgettable story of life and death on the hidden Irish island of Inis Caillte.
Huddled in the sea off the coast of Ireland is a fourth Aran Island, a secret island peopled by the lost, findable only in moments of despair. Whether drowned at sea, trampled by Cromwell's soldiers, or exiled for clinging to the dead, no outsiders reach the island without giving in to dark emotion.
Time and again, The Fourth Island weaves a hypnotic pattern with its prose, presaging doom before walking back through the sweet and sour moments of lives not yet lost. It beautifully melds the certainty of loss with the joys of living, drawing readers under like the tide.
Making Media Theory: Thinking Critically with Technology, by Marcel O'Gorman, Bloomsbury, 2020.
Making Media Theory is about the study, practice, and hands-on design of media theory. It looks at experimental research methods and engages in media analysis, inviting readers to respond to and shape the materiality of media while carefully considering the implications of living in a technoculture. The author walks readers through the creation of digital objects to think with, where critical design practices serve as tools for exploring social and philosophical issues related to technological being and becoming.
None of the Above: Nonreligious Identity in the US and Canada, by Joel Thiessen and Sarah Wilkins-Laflamme, New York University Press, 2020.
Almost a quarter of American and Canadian adults are nonreligious, while teens and young adults are even less likely to identify religiously. None of the Above explores the growing phenomenon of “religious nones” in North America. Who are the religious nones? Why, and where, is this population growing?
None of the Above asserts that a growing divide between religious and nonreligious populations could engender a greater distance in moral and political values and behaviors. At once provocative and insightful, this book tackles questions of coexistence, religious tolerance, and spirituality, as American and Canadian society accelerate toward a more secular future.