A denunciation of the credentialed elite class that serves capitalism while insisting on its own progressive heroism Professional Managerial Class (PMC) elite workers labor in a world of performative identity and virtue signaling, publicizing an ability to do ordinary things in fundamentally superior ways. Author Catherine Liu shows how the PMC stands in the way of social justice and economic redistribution by promoting meritocracy, philanthropy, and other self-serving operations to abet an individualist path to a better world. Virtue Hoarders is an unapologetically polemical call to reject making a virtue out of taste and consumption habits. Forerunners: Ideas First is a thought-in-process series of breakthrough digital publications. Written between fresh ideas and finished books, Forerunners draws on scholarly work initiated in notable blogs, social media, conference plenaries, journal articles, and the synergy of academic exchange. This is gray literature publishing: where intense thinking, change, and speculation take place in scholarship.

"Risible offers an alternative re-telling of the intellectual, technological, and sonic history of laughter, a phenomenon that cannot be accounted for through its causes (such as theories of comedy). Instead, Delia Casadei argues, laughter is a technique of the human body, knowable by its repetitive, clipped, and proliferating sound and its enduring links to the capacity for language and reproduction. The long-forgotten history of laughter--which reaches back to ancient Greece--re-emerges with explosive force in the late nineteenth century thanks to the binding of laughter to sound-reproduction technology. This alternative genealogy of laughter as human technique and sound technology is thrown into stark relief by the tension between the ownership and reproduction of the black voice in phonograph records, in metaphors of contagion and laughter in the early global market of phonographic laughing songs, and in the strange commodity of pre-recorded laughtracks. As such, laughter becomes a means of working out the very category of sound (not-quite-human, unintelligible, reproductive and reproducible, contagious) across the twentieth century"--

The Covid-19 pandemic and the disruptions of climate change are features of post-normal times. In Sociology in Post-Normal Times, Charles Thorpe contends that the modern project of creating normalcy within the nation state has broken down. Integral to this is sociology, which is the science of social reform. Drawing from the work of seminal theorists such as Zygmunt Bauman and Anthony Giddens, Thorpe contends that sociology's “society” is no longer viable because globalization has put an end to social reform, thus the assumptions and goals of sociology must be left behind in order to create a new global humanity. In the face of the pandemic and climate change, Sociology in Post-Normal Times demands no less than the birth of a global humanity beyond nation states as the precondition for human survival.

This book aims to extract a kind of Critical Humanism from the works of prominent members of the Frankfurt School. Oliver Kozlarek argues that what is compelling about this kind of restitution of humanism is the fact that it sought to be understood not as a conceptual-theoretical construction, but as a practice of critical social and cultural research. This means that it does not orient itself to an ideal image of the human being, but to making inhuman conditions of our current societies visible. It is above all in this sense that humanism is no longer understood in a Humboldtian, educational sense. Rather, it is about using critical social research as a political practice.

This book looks at the political aspects of comedy and how humor is shaped by unconscious social and psychological factors within a particular cultural and historical context. Updating Freud’s work on jokes, Robert Samuels argues that any universal model of comedy must take into account the role played by distinct genres, which are themselves determined by particular political psychopathologies. In looking at contemporary comedy, we encounter a structure that is often seen throughout the world: in response to what is experienced as a Leftist super-ego censoring thoughts and speech and a Libertarian Right which promotes free speech as the ultimate value. Within this dynamic, comedians seeking to make their audience laugh by poking fun at sensitive and taboo subjects, intentionally and unintentionally, these humorists present an alternative to Left-wing political correctness and identity politics. Contemporary comedians then cannot help but to cater to Right-wing politics since the Right is centered on loudly rejecting the cultural dictations of the Left.

This volume makes the novel contribution of applying Nancy Fraser’s concept of progressive neoliberalism to education in order to illustrate how social justice efforts have been co-opted by neoliberal forces. As well as recognising the lack of consensus surrounding the very nature of Fraser’s concept of progressive neoliberalism, the book delivers a diversity of perspectives and methodological orientations that offer critical and nuanced examination of the diverse ways in which progressive neoliberalism has shaped education in North America. Documenting manifestations of progressive neoliberalism in areas including anti-racist education, teacher education, STEM, and assessment, the volume uses qualitative empirical research and critical discourse analysis to identify emerging tools and strategies to disentangle the progressive aims of education from neoliberal agendas. Offering a rarely nuanced treatment of the phenomenon of neoliberalism, this text will benefit scholars, academics, and students in the fields of education policy and politics, the sociology of education, and the philosophy of education more broadly. Those involved with the theory of education and multicultural education in general will also benefit from this volume.

Culture is at the heart to what it means to be human. But twenty-five years ago, the British government rebranded art and culture as ‘creative industries’, valued for their economic contribution, and set out to launch the UK as the creative workshop of a globalised world. Where does that leave art and culture now? Facing exhausted workers and a lack of funding and vision, culture finds itself in the grip of accountancy firms, creativity gurus and Ted Talkers. At a time of sweeping geo-political turmoil, culture has been de-politicised, its radical energies reduced to factors of industrial production. This book is about what happens when an essential part of our democratic citizenship, fundamental to our human rights, is reduced to an industry. Culture is not an industry argues that art and culture need to renew their social contract and re-align with the radical agenda for a more equitable future. Bold and uncompromising, the book offers a powerful vision for change.