Books in the Continental Philosophy in Austral-Asia series

The volume is inspired by Gilles Deleuze's philosophical project, which builds on the critique of European Humanism and opens up inspiring new perspectives for the renewal of the field.

This book uses current debates over Michel Foucault's method of genealogy as a practice of critique to reveal the historical constitution of contemporary alternative food discourses.

Tracing the complex yet intimate relationship between a present-day national obsession with childhood and a colonial past with which Australia as a nation has not adequately come to terms, Young and Free draws on philosophy, literature, film and testimony. The result is a demonstration of how anxiety about childhood has become a screen for more fundamental and intractable issues that vex Australian social and political life. Joanne Faulkner argues that by interpreting these anxieties in their relation to settler-colonial Australia's unresolved conflict with Aboriginal people, new ways of conceiving of Australian community may be opened. The book engages with philosophical and literary characterizations of childhood, from Locke and Rousseau, to Freud, Bergson, Benjamin Agamben, Lacan, Ranciere and Halbwachs. The author's psychoanalytic approach is supplemented by an engagement with contemporary political philosophy that informs Faulkner's critique of the concepts of the subject, sovereignty and knowledge, resulting in a speculative postcolonial model of the subject.Cover artist credit: Lyndsay Bird MpetyaneArtwork title: Ahakeye (Bush Plum)

The Phenomenology of Gravidity explores the particularity of womens engagements with gestation, linking the denial of certain embodied experiences of pregnancy to gender oppression. Employing the term gravidity to name the metaphysical condition of having conceived, Lymer develops a theory of maternity that emphasises the interactive nature of gestation, highlighting the necessity for women to choose to become maternal as an important factor in optimal foetal development. Critically drawing on bonding and attachment theory, Lymer rethinks debates around abortion, adoption and surrogacy which ignore the ethical and practical implications of an understanding of gestation that is necessarily interactive and embodied, challenging the view of the pregnant woman as a passive container. Through an engagement with the work of Merleau-Ponty, Levinas and Derrida, The Phenomenology of Gravidityoffers an ethical feminist framework for a hospitality of gravidity which welcomes the place of the pregnant mother in all her guises, while highlighting the medical, legal and ethical consequences of failing in this welcome.

The volume is inspired by Gilles Deleuze's philosophical project, which builds on the critique of European Humanism and opens up inspiring new perspectives for the renewal of the field.

Drawing on recent work in social epistemology, critical race theory, and settler colonial studies, Millicent Churcher outlines how Adam Smith's account of 'sympathy' as an imaginative and reflective capacity provides fertile resources for addressing systemic failures to recognize the histories, needs, and experiences of marginalized social groups.