These original essays explore how the concept of revolution permeates and unifies Julia Kristeva's body of work by tracing its trajectory from her early engagement with the Tel Quel group, through her preoccupation in the 1980s with abjection, melancholia, and love, to her latest work. Some of the leading voices in Kristeva scholarship examine her reevaluation of the concept of revolt in the context of the changing cultural and political conditions in the West; the questions of the stranger, race, and nation; her reflections on narrative, public spaces, and collectivity in the context of her engagement with Hannah Arendt's work; her development and refinement of the notions of abjection, melancholia, and narcissism in her ongoing interrogation of aesthetics; as well as her contribution to film theory. Focused primarily on Kristeva's newest work—much of it only recently translated into English—this book breaks new ground in Kristeva scholarship.

This wide-reaching handbook offers a new perspective on the sociology of health, illness and medicine by stressing the importance of social theory. Examining a range of classic and contemporary female and male theorists from across the globe, it explores various issues including chronic illness, counselling and the rising problems of obesity.

With the fall of the regimes in Tunisia and Egypt the term ‘Facebook Revolution’ was coined depicting the world’s most popular social media platform as a condition sine qua non for the Arab revolutions. Moving on from the extreme positions of cyber-utopians and pessimists, this study identifies and analyses mechanisms of use and potential intermediary effects of social media in connection with other driving factors of mass demonstrations that led to the fall of the Mubarak regime in early 2011. Semi-structured focus interviews were carried out with social media activists in Cairo between November 20th and 24th, 2011. The qualitative content analysis of eight interviews allowed for the identification of relevant categories and sub-categories as well as possible connections between them. Additionally, a thorough analysis of the Egyptian socio-economic, political and media system in the years leading up to the revolution provides the basis for valuable and contextual conclusions. Among the key findings is the accelerating effect of social media in mobilizing the Egyptian population to take part in mass demonstrations. Whereas the organizational function is limited to online network effects rather than facilitating the coordination of protesters on the ground, a significant impact of social media on the perception of a collective identity and threshold levels relevant for individual protest behavior was identified through this research. Moreover, the findings implicate a mutual dependency between new social media and traditional mass media.

In her 1974 Revolution in Poetic Language, Julia Kristeva resisted the abstract use of language, with its aim of totalization and finality, in all its colonizing and alienating forms. A major thinker and critic, Kristeva reappropriated Hegel's concepts of desire and negativity, in conjunction with the thought of Heidegger, Arendt, Freud, and Lacan, to revolt against modernity's culture of nihilism and the West's inability to deal with loss. This collection celebrates the fiftieth anniversary of Revolution in Poetic Language by revisiting Kristeva's oeuvre and establishing exciting new directions in Kristeva studies. Engaging with queer and transgender studies, disability studies, decolonial studies, and more, renowned and rising scholars plot continuities in—and push the boundaries of—Kristeva's thinking about loss, revolution, and revolt. The volume also includes two essays by Kristeva, translated into English for the first time here—"The Impossibility of Loss" (1988) and "Of What Use Are Poets in Times of Distress?" (2016).

How insurgencies—enabled by digital devices and a vast information sphere—have mobilized millions of ordinary people around the world. In the words of economist and scholar Arnold Kling, Martin Gurri saw it coming. Technology has categorically reversed the information balance of power between the public and the elites who manage the great hierarchical institutions of the industrial age: government, political parties, the media. The Revolt of the Public tells the story of how insurgencies, enabled by digital devices and a vast information sphere, have mobilized millions of ordinary people around the world. Originally published in 2014, The Revolt of the Public is now available in an updated edition, which includes an extensive analysis of Donald Trump’s improbable rise to the presidency and the electoral triumphs of Brexit. The book concludes with a speculative look forward, pondering whether the current elite class can bring about a reformation of the democratic process and whether new organizing principles, adapted to a digital world, can arise out of the present political turbulence.

This book appraises the relationship between contemporary feminism and Julia Kristeva, a major figure in Continental thought. It addresses the conflicting range of feminist responses to Kristeva's key ideas and Kristeva's equally conflicting as well as am