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The major part of this book project was funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant agreement No. 700913.
This book is about two distinct but related professional cultures in late Soviet
Russia that were concerned with material objects: industrial design and
decorative art. The Russian avant-garde of the 1920s is broadly recognised to
have been Russia’s first truly original contribution to world culture. In
contrast, Soviet design of the post-war period is often dismissed as hackwork
and plagiarism that resulted in a shabby world of commodities. This book
identifies the second historical attempt at creating a powerful alternative to
capitalist commodities in the Cold War era. It offers a new perspective on the
history of Soviet material culture by focusing on the notion of the ‘comradely
object’ as an agent of progressive social relations that state-sponsored Soviet
design inherited from the avant-garde. It introduces a shared history of
domestic objects, handmade as well as machine-made, mass-produced as well as
unique, utilitarian as well as challenging the conventional notion of utility.
Situated at the intersection of intellectual history, social history and
material culture studies, this book elucidates the complexities and
contradictions of Soviet design that echoed international tendencies of the late
twentieth century. The book is addressed to design historians, art historians,
scholars of material culture, historians of Russia and the USSR, as well as
museum and gallery curators, artists and designers, and the broader public
interested in modern aesthetics, art and design, and/or the legacy of socialist
regimes.
German philosopher Jürgen Habermas has written extensively on the European Union.
This is the only in-depth account of his project. Published now in a second
edition to coincide with the celebration of his ninetieth birthday, a new
preface considers Habermas’s writings on the eurozone and refugee crises,
populism and Brexit, and the presidency of Emmanuel Macron.
Placing an
emphasis on the conception of the EU that informs Habermas’s political
prescriptions, the book is divided into two main parts. The first considers the
unfolding of 'social modernity' at the level of the EU. Among the
subjects covered are Habermas's concept of juridification, the
latter's affinities with integration theories such as neofunctionalism, and
the application of Habermas's democratic theory to the EU. The second part
addresses 'cultural modernity' in Europe – 'Europessimism'
is argued to be a subset of the broader cultural pessimism that assailed the
project of modernity in the late twentieth century, and with renewed intensity
in the years since 9/11.
Interdisciplinary in approach, this book engages
with European/EU studies, critical theory, political theory, international
relations, intellectual history, comparative literature, and philosophy. Concise
and clearly written, it will be of interest to students, scholars and
professionals with an interest in these disciplines, as well as to a broader
readership concerned with the future of Europe
Pierre Bourdieu's social theory and drawing on thought in anthropology, international relations and political science, it outlines a structural constructivist theory of European integration that contrasts with social constructivism and older approaches such as intergovernmentalism. Second, by recentring the analysis of Europe on the political agents -politicians, civil activists, intellectuals, bureaucrats - involved in its construction, this work investigates, through case studies on France and Finland, how agents struggle with the transformations that European
Identity is often regarded as something that is possessed by individuals, states, and other agents. In this edited collection, identity is explored across a range of approaches and under-explored case studies with a view to making visible its fractured, contingent, and dynamic features. The book brings together themes of belonging and exclusion, identity formation and fragmentation. It also examines how identity functions in discourse, and the effects it produces, both materially and in ideational terms. Taking in case studies from Asia-Pacific, Europe, the Middle East and Latin America, the various chapters interrogate identity through formal governing mechanisms, popular culture and place. These studies demonstrate the complex and fluid nature of identity and identity practices, as well as implications for theorising identity.
Manchester: Something rich and strange challenges us to see the quintessential post-industrial city in new ways. Bringing together twenty-three diverse writers and a wide range of photographs of Greater Manchester, it argues that how we see the city can have a powerful effect on its future – an urgent question given how quickly the urban core is being transformed. The book uses sixty different words to speak about the diversity of what we think of as Manchester – whether the chimneys of its old mills, the cobbles mostly hidden under the tarmac, the passages between terraces, or the everyday act of washing clothes in a laundrette. Unashamedly down to earth in its focus, this book makes the case for a renewed imaginative relationship that recognises and champions the fact that we’re all active in the making and unmaking of urban spaces.
This book examines the relationship between environmental justice and citizen science, focusing on enduring issues and new challenges in a post-truth age. Debates over science, facts, and values have always been pivotal within environmental justice struggles. For decades, environmental justice activists have campaigned against the misuses of science, while at the same time engaging in community-led citizen science. However, post-truth politics has threatened science itself. This book makes the case for the importance of science, knowledge, and data that are produced by and for ordinary people living with environmental risks and hazards. The international, interdisciplinary contributions range from grassroots environmental justice struggles in American hog country and contaminated indigenous communities, to local environmental controversies in Spain and China, to questions about “knowledge justice,” citizenship, participation, and data in citizen science surrounding toxicity. The book features inspiring studies of community-based participatory environmental health and justice research; different ways of sensing, witnessing, and interpreting environmental injustice; political strategies for seeking environmental justice; and ways of expanding the concepts and forms of engagement of citizen science around the world. While the book will be of critical interest to specialists in social and environmental sciences, it will also be accessible to graduate and postgraduate audiences. More broadly, the book will appeal to members of the public interested in social justice issues, as well as community members who are thinking about participating in citizen science and activism. Toxic Truths includes distinguished contributing authors in the field of environmental justice, alongside cutting-edge research from emerging scholars and community activists.
The main aim of the chapter is to put the theoretical framework of the previous chapters to use and provide the ‘big picture’ about the political-ethical experience of living in illiberal regimes. The chapter starts with the operationalization of the neo-Aristotelian regime theory by translating its general characterization of illiberal regimes into five (egalitarian, competitive, authoritarian, oligarchic, and self-preservative) principles of action that will appear in the everyday considerations of people living in illiberal regimes. The goal is to make the ethics of politics as playing hardball (a constitutive experience of living in illiberal regimes) more accessible to the readers. Then the chapter proceeds with the explication of some important metaethical implications of political realism that are also relevant to the problem of playing hardball, notably: value pluralism, the dirty hands problem, moral dilemmas, and political compromise. The next part of the chapter turns to the question of how various normative contexts (among which political regimes stand out as especially important) shape political agency: after explaining why neither abstract individualism nor social constructivism is a good starting point for understanding the political-ethical experience of actual people in normative political theoretical terms, the chapter examines five types of primary normative contexts that shape political agency and will play an important role in the analysis of the political-ethical experience of living in illiberal regimes in the second part of the book: ad hoc and general reasons for action, political rule, membership in various political associations, political regimes, and political offices, and political virtues.
on the rise of social constructivism. On the other, I trace how the productivist body of eastern European Marxism has become gradually irrelevant and replaced by a rival ideology of identity and its epistemology. Gender and Cold War liberalism Gender became a mode of indicating a person’s identity as part of a strong wave of anti-communist politics
Introduction The growing significance which has been attributed to language and communication in IR responded to the critical turn in social and political theory. Its impact on IR manifested itself variously in the insights of social constructivism, the application to the world stage of the critical theory of the Frankfurt School, the philosophy
together in the centre of the linen. The work seems too fresh and the frame too modern to be a Russian-based creation. Is this Alice’s moment of nostalgia, her Russian childhood? A tenderness and fragility pressed behind glass, a memory in thread. The second piece, in stark contrast, is her modern triumph. A large abstract work, the flower motifs have lost their delicacy and fastidiousness; in their place are chunky triangular applique tulips and geometrical shapes. More akin to Russian Constructivism or Bauhaus design than traditional embroidery, it is an abstract