"Davis' writing debut is a triumph - utilising razor sharp whit and satire against a well crafted sci-fi world. If you're a fan of Black Mirror then this book is for you." Adam Pearson, BBC actor and TV presenter, star of the Oscar-nominated A Different Man (2024)Conspiracy theorist Theo has a loyal online following, a DIY podcast studio in a pub basement, and a theory that interdimensional vampires are stealing people's souls. It's niche-but growing.When d...

'In simple prose Merleau-Ponty touches on his principle themes. He speaks about the body and the world, the coexistence of space and things, the unfortunate optimism of science – and also the insidious stickiness of honey, and the mystery of anger.' - James ElkinsMaurice Merleau-Ponty was one of the most important thinkers of the post-war era. Central to his thought was the idea that human understanding comes from our bodily experience of the world that we...

'Painting does not imitate the world, but is a world of its own.'In 1948, Maurice Merleau-Ponty wrote and delivered on French radio a series of seven lectures on the theme of perception. Translated here into English for the first time, they offer a lucid and concise insight into one of the great philosophical minds of the twentieth-century.These lectures explore themes central not only to Merleau-Ponty's philosophy but phenomenology as a whole. He begins by rejecting the id...

What does ‘autonomy’ mean today? Is the Enlightenment understanding of autonomy still relevant for contemporary challenges? How have the limits and possibilities of autonomy been transformed by recent developments in artificial intelligence and big data, political pressures, intersecting oppressions and the climate emergency? The challenges to autonomy today reach across society with unprecedented complexity, and in this book leading scholars from philosophy, economics, linguistics, litera...

Hatred of Sex links Jacques Rancière’s political philosophy of the constitutive disorder of democracy with Jean Laplanche’s identification of a fundamental perturbation at the heart of human sexuality. Sex is hated as well as desired, Oliver Davis and Tim Dean contend, because sexual intensity impedes coherent selfhood and undermines identity, rendering us all a little more deplorable than we might wish. Davis and Dean explore the consequences of this conflicted dynamic across a r...

Universities are increasingly being asked to take an active role as research collaborators with citizens, public bodies, and community organisations, which, it is claimed, makes them more accountable, creates better research outcomes, and enhances the knowledge base. Yet many of these research collaborators, as well as their funders and institutions, have not yet developed the methods to ‘account for’ collaborative research, or to help collaborators in challenging their assumptions about t...

Heritage as Community Research explores the nature of contemporary heritage research involving university and community partners. Putting forward a new view of heritage as a process of research and involvement with the past, undertaken with or by the communities for whom it is relevant, the book uses a diverse range of case studies, with many chapters co-written between academics and community partners. Through this extensive work, the Editors show that the process of research itself can b...

The French philosopher Jacques Rancière is well known across the world for his groundbreaking contributions to aesthetic and political theory and for his radical rethinking of the question of equality. This much-needed new collection situates Rancière's thought in a range of practical and theoretical contexts.These specially commissioned essays cover the complete history of Rancière's work and reflect its interdisciplinary reach. They span his early historical research of the 1960s...

This book is a critical introduction to contemporary French philosopher Jacques Rancière. It is the first introduction in any language to cover all of his major work and offers an accessible presentation and searching evaluation of his significant contributions to the fields of politics, pedagogy, history, literature, film theory and aesthetics.This book traces the emergence of Rancière’s thought over the last forty-five years and situates it in the diverse intellectual contexts in...

The relationship between sociology and social critique has haunted the discipline since its origins. Does critique divert sociology from its scientific project? Or is critique the ultimate goal of sociology, without which the latter would be a futile activity disconnected from the concerns of ordinary people? This issue has underpinned two divergent theoretical orientations that can be found in the discipline today: the critical sociology that was developed in its most elaborate form by Pi...

Marxism's collapse in the twentieth century profoundly altered the style and substance of Western European radical thought. To build a more robust form of democratic theory and action, prominent theorists moved to reject revolution, abandon class for more fragmented models of social action, and elevate the political over the social. Acknowledging the constructedness of society and politics, they chose the "symbolic" as a concept powerful enough to reinvent leftist thought outside a Marxist...

The French philosopher Jacques Rancière has influenced disciplines from history and philosophy to political theory, literature, art history, and film studies. His research into nineteenth-century workers’ archives, reflections on political equality, critique of the traditional division between intellectual and manual labor, and analysis of the place of literature, film, and art in modern society have all constituted major contributions to contemporary thought. In this collection, leading s...