A defense of the radical imagination from a scholar of social movements. Political theorist and philosopher Richard Gilman-Opalsky’s Imaginary Power, Real Horizons is a tribute to the imagination and to its necessity for liberatory struggle. “‘Impractical’ is the name given to anyone who imagines something radically other than what exists,” he writes. However, many things—such as the abolition of slavery—were dismissed as impractical before they came to be. In a warm, plainspoken manner, these essays chart the affects of creativity and utopianism through topics as varied as the cyclical nature of popular movements; the international history of May Day; the experience of teaching political theory and Marxism in contemporary China; and the revolutionary aspirations of Free Jazz. The human imagination is a real, world-creating power, and those who would declare otherwise have a poor understanding of history. Imaginary Power, Real Horizons is a call to action for those who would dare to dream of a society organized by a different logic than capitalism.

No, Anti-Book is not a book about books. Not exactly. And yet it is a must for anyone interested in the future of the book. Presenting what he terms “a communism of textual matter,” Nicholas Thoburn explores the encounter between political thought and experimental writing and publishing, shifting the politics of text from an exclusive concern with content and meaning to the media forms and social relations by which text is produced and consumed. Taking a “post-digital” approach in considering a wide array of textual media forms, Thoburn invites us to challenge the commodity form of books—to stop imagining books as transcendent intellectual, moral, and aesthetic goods unsullied by commerce. His critique is, instead, one immersed in the many materialities of text. Anti-Book engages with an array of writing and publishing projects, including Antonin Artaud’s paper gris-gris, Valerie Solanas’s SCUM Manifesto, Guy Debord’s sandpaper-bound Mémoires, the collective novelist Wu Ming, and the digital/print hybrid of Mute magazine. Empirically grounded, it is also a major achievement in expressing a political philosophy of writing and publishing, where the materiality of text is interlaced with conceptual production. Each chapter investigates a different form of textual media in concert with a particular concept: the small-press pamphlet as “communist object,” the magazine as “diagrammatic publishing,” political books in the modes of “root” and “rhizome,” the “multiple single” of anonymous authorship, and myth as “unidentified narrative object.” An absorbingly written contribution to contemporary media theory in all its manifestations, Anti-Book will enrich current debates about radical publishing, artists’ books and other new genre and media forms in alternative media, art publishing, media studies, cultural studies, critical theory, and social and political theory.

From warnings on coffee cups to colour–coded terrorist gauges to ubiquitous security cameras, our culture is obsessed with safety. Some of this is drive by lawyers and insurance companies, and some by over–zealous public officials, but much is indicative of a cultural conversation that has lost its bearings. The result is not just a neurotically restrictive society, but one which actively undermines individual and community self–reliance. More importantly, we are creating a world of officious administration, management by statistics, absurd regulations, rampaging lawsuits, and hygenically cleansed public spaces. We are trying to render the human and natural worlds predictable and calculated. In doing so, we are trampling common discourse about politics and ethics. Hern asserts that safer just isn't always better. Throughout Watch Yourself, he emphasizes the need to rethink our approach to risk, reconsider our fixation with safety, and reassert individual decision–making.

This book is a short introduction to power system planning and operation using advanced geometrical methods. The approach is based on well-known insights and techniques developed in theoretical physics in the context of Riemannian manifolds. The proof of principle and robustness of this approach is examined in the context of the IEEE 5 bus system. This work addresses applied mathematicians, theoretical physicists and power engineers interested in novel mathematical approaches to power network theory.

This book is part of a large and growing body of work on the observation of analogue gravity effects, such as Hawking radiation, in laboratory systems. The book is highly didactic, skillfully navigating between concepts ranging from quantum field theory on curved space-times, nonlinear fibre optics and the theoretical and experimental foundations in the physics of optical analogues to the Event Horizon. It presents a comprehensive field-theoretical framework for these systems, including the kinematics governing the fields. This allows an analytical calculation of the all-important conversion of vacuum fluctuations into Hawking radiation. Based on this, emission spectra are computed, providing unique insights into the emissions from a highly dispersive system. In an experimental part, the book develops a clear and systematic way to experimentally approach the problem and demonstrates the construction of an experimental setup and measurements of unprecedented sensitivity in the search for stimulation of the Hawking effect.

This new edition includes over 650 mordant definitions by Bufe—twice as many as in the original edition—and 40 illustrations by San Francisco artist and filmmaker J. R. Swanson. The definitions skewer such targets as religion, the "right to life" movement, capitalism, marxism, the IRS, politicians of all stripes, and common euphemisms, as well as male-female relations and sexual attitudes, something which Bierce, writing in more conservative times, was not free to do. The book concludes with a lengthy appendix of the best 200 definitions from Bierce's The Devil's Dictionary.

This volume presents both a historical exploration of ethnography and a thematic discussion of major trends that, over different periods, have oriented and re-oriented research practice. As it overviews ethnography from different geographic and thematic perspectives, it further explores new lines of ethnographic research, including as feminist ethnography and visual research, that uncover non-traditional routes to anthropological knowledge. As the great ethnographer E. E. Evans-Pritchard wrote, “Anyone who is not a complete idiot can do fieldwork... but will [his contribution] be to theoretical, or just to factual knowledge?” As Evans-Pritchard highlights and as this book argues, successful ethnography must be connected to a sophisticated theoretical reflection rooted in social and cultural anthropology.