Precarious objects explores the traffic between design and activism by telling stories drawn from contemporary counter-precarity cases in Italy. As a category of labour and of global social experience in general, precarity is a wicked problem that affects all aspects of life, regulating the production and circulation of a wide range of material and immaterial effects. In this book, three microhistories of counter-precarity explore existent forms of resistance and resilience to precarity. Drawing on ethnographies and archives and bringing together debates from design theory, cultural studies and geography, this study shows how design objects and practices recode political communication and reorient how things are imagined, produced and circulated. It also shows how design as a practice can reconfigure material conditions and prefigure ways to repair some of the effects of precarity on everyday life.

Precarious Forms: Performing Utopia in the Neoliberal Americas explores how performance art and poetry convey utopian desires even in the bleakest of times. Candice Amich argues that utopian longing in the neoliberal Americas paradoxically arises from the material conditions of socioeconomic crisis. Working across national, linguistic, and generic boundaries, Amich identifies new political and affective modes of reception in her examination of resistant art forms. She locates texts in the activist struggles of the Global South, where neoliberal extraction and exploitation most palpably reanimate the colonial and imperial legacies of earlier stages of capitalism. The poets and artists surveyed in Precarious Forms enact gestures of solidarity and mutual care at sites of neoliberal dispossession. In her analysis of poems, body art, and multimedia installations that illuminate the persistence of a radical utopian imaginary in the Americas, Amich engages critical debates in performance studies, Latin American cultural studies, literature, and art history.

On a November evening in 1989, Laura Levitt was raped in her own bed. Her landlord heard the assault taking place and called 911, but the police arrived too late to apprehend Laura’s attacker. When they left, investigators took items with them—a pair of sweatpants, the bedclothes—and a rape exam was performed at the hospital. However, this evidence was never processed. Decades later, Laura returns to these objects, viewing them not as clues that will lead to the identification of her assailant but rather as a means of engaging traumatic legacies writ large. The Objects That Remain is equal parts personal memoir and fascinating examination of the ways in which the material remains of violent crimes inform our experience of, and thinking about, trauma and loss. Considering artifacts in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and evidence in police storage facilities across the country, Laura’s story moves between intimate trauma, the story of an unsolved rape, and genocide. Throughout, she asks what it might mean to do justice to these violent pasts outside the juridical system or through historical empiricism, which are the dominant ways in which we think about evidence from violent crimes and other highly traumatic events. Over the course of her investigation, the author reveals how these objects that remain and the stories that surround them enable forms of intimacy. In this way, she models for us a different kind of reckoning, where justice is an animating process of telling and holding.

The study of isoperimetric inequalities involves a fascinating interplay of analysis, geometry and the theory of partial differential equations. Several conjectures have been made and while many have been resolved, a large number still remain open. One of the principal tools in the study of isoperimetric problems, especially when spherical symmetry is involved, is Schwarz symmetrization, which is also known as the spherically symmetric and decreasing rearrangement of functions. The aim of this book is to give an introduction to the theory of Schwarz symmetrization and study some of its applications. The book gives an modern and up-to-date treatment of the subject and includes several new results proved recently. Effort has been made to keep the exposition as simple and self-contained as possible. A knowledge of the existence theory of weak solutions of elliptic partial differential equations in Sobolev spaces is, however, assumed. Apart from this and a general mathematical maturity at the graduate level, there are no other prerequisites.

Collecting is usually understood as an activity that bestows permanence, unity, and meaning on otherwise scattered and ephemeral objects. In The Redemption of Things, Samuel Frederick emphasizes that to collect things, however, always entails displacing, immobilizing, and potentially disfiguring them, too. He argues that the dispersal of objects, seemingly antithetical to the collector's task, is essential to the logic of gathering and preservation. Through analyses of collecting as a dialectical process of preservation and loss, The Redemption of Things illustrates this paradox by focusing on objects that challenge notions of collectability: ephemera, detritus, and trivialities such as moss, junk, paper scraps, dust, scent, and the transitory moment. In meticulous close readings of works by Gotthelf, Stifter, Keller, Rilke, Glauser, and Frisch, and by examining an experimental film by Oskar Fischinger, Frederick reveals how the difficulties posed by these fleeting, fragile, and forsaken objects help to reconceptualize collecting as a poetic activity that makes the world of scattered things uniquely palpable and knowable.

In 1958 or 1959 (we're not sure which), Eris, the Goddess of Confusion, sent an Emperor Penguin to a bowling alley in California. It appeared before Malaclypse the Younger and Lord Omar Khayyam Ravenhurst and inspired them to create the Discordian Society: a tribe of philosophers, theologians, magicians, scientists, artists, clowns, and similar maniacs. The Et Cetera Discordia proudly celebrates 50th the anniversary of this prophetic vision. It is a collage of the funny, weird, and often profound writings and art created by numerous modern (and post-modern) Discordians. This book is an invitation to join them in exploring, celebrating, and remixing this strange and exciting century.