Books by Sinead Murphy

In this full-blooded attack on the institutions of higher education, Sinead Murphy shows the neoliberal university for what it really is: a zombie institution, churning out generations of the thinking dead.

Lee is a tiny tiger who lives with his Mum in the safety of his tree-top house. There he feels safe from the dangers of the dark jungle below. But one wild stormy night, Lee and his Mum are thrown to the ground and Lee is forced to face his fears in order to help her.

The theme of disinterest is a dominant one in philosophical accounts of aesthetic experience, and, unlike many philosophical themes, it has had and continues to have a huge effect, on presuppositions about the nature of judgment, of feeling, of art, of resistance, of all of those experiences and activities that appear to operate at least partly outside of the given regulations of human existence. The Art Kettle has two aims: first, to show that modern art - that is, art during and since the Enlightenment - is not only itself defined by disinterest, by dearth of purpose, but functions as a standard for creativity, for free thinking, for choice, for indulgence, for questioning, and for protest, that suits very well the requirement, in our capitalist democracies, that differences and resistances expend themselves without effect on the combination of conservatism and consumption that supports these democracies; second, to show that the historical conflation of aesthetic experience and disinterest is subject to resistance from another historical conflation: of aesthetic experience and use or purpose.