Books in the Forerunners: Ideas First series

What can we learn about culture from other species?

Mobility studies scholar Christopher Schaberg considers the time leading up to the COVID-19 pandemic and the ensuing global plummet in commercial flight. Grounded blends journalistic reportage with cultural theory and philosophical inquiry in order to offer graspable insights as well as a stinging critique of contemporary air travel.

Tracing the erosion of democratic norms in the US and the conditions that make it possible Jonathan Beecher Field tracks the permutations of the town hall meeting from its original context as a form of democratic community governance in New England into a format for presidential debates and a staple of corporate governance. In its contemporary iteration, the town hall meeting models the aesthetic of the former but replaces actual democratic deliberation with a spectacle that involves no immediate electoral stakes or functions as a glorified press conference. Urgently, Field notes that though this evolution might be apparent, evidence suggests many US citizens don’t care to differentiate. Forerunners: Ideas First Short books of thought-in-process scholarship, where intense analysis, questioning, and speculation take the lead

Matthew J. Wolf-Meyer is associate professor of anthropology at Binghamton University. He is author of The Slumbering Masses: Sleep, Medicine, and Modern American Life (Minnesota, 2012).

UW Struggle provides an on-the-ground view of the smoldering attack on public higher education in Wisconsin. This is a chronicle of failed leadership and what actions, if any, can protect this vital American institution.

Making sense of public identities, online and offline

The stock market is the background of how we begin to deal with the complex imbrication of humans, machines, and noise

Proposes a vision of survival and flourishing in the face of economic and environmental catastrophe

The evolution and meaning of our love affair with Apple and its devices

Joanna Zylinska is professor of new media and communications at Goldsmiths, University of London. She is a photomedia artist, curator, and author of several books.

Examines the material spaces in which our networks entangle themselves

Rekindling Deleuze's opposition to what is intolerable about this world

Nationality is not enough to understand “Latin”-descended populations in the United States LatinX has neither country nor fixed geography. LatinX, according to Claudia Milian, is the most powerful conceptual tool of the Latino/a present, an itinerary whose analytic routes incorporate the Global South and ecological devastation. Milian’s trailblazing study deploys the indeterminate but thunderous “X” as intellectual armor, a speculative springboard, and a question for our times that never stops being asked. LatinX sorts out and addresses issues about the unknowability of social realities that exceed our present knowledge.Forerunners: Ideas FirstShort books of thought-in-process scholarship, where intense analysis, questioning, and speculation take the lead

A fresh, important intervention into understanding our post-9/11 world

Drawing up alternate ways to “make a living” beyond capitalism To live in this world is to be conditioned by capital. Once paired with Western democracy, unfettered capitalism has led to a shrinking economic system that squeezes out billions of people—creating a planet of surplus populations. Wageless Life is a manifesto for building a future beyond the toxic failures of late-stage capitalism. Daring to imagine new social relations, new modes of economic existence, and new collective worlds, the authors provide skills and tools for perceiving—and living in— a post-capitalist future. Forerunners: Ideas FirstShort books of thought-in-process scholarship, where intense analysis, questioning, and speculation take the lead

An investigation of how-to guides for sensor technologies Sensors are increasingly common within citizen-sensing and DIY projects, but these devices often require the use of a how-to guide. From online instructional videos for troubleshooting sensor installations to handbooks for using and abusing the Internet of Things, the how-to genres and formats of digital instruction continue to expand and develop. As the how-to proliferates, and instructions unfold through multiple aspects of technoscientific practices, Jennifer Gabrys asks why the how-to has become one of the prevailing genres of the digital. How to Do Things with Sensors explores the ways in which things are made do-able with and through sensors and further considers how worlds are made sense-able and actionable through the instructional mode of citizen-sensing projects.Forerunners: Ideas FirstShort books of thought-in-process scholarship, where intense analysis, questioning, and speculation take the lead

La paperson is also K. Wayne Yang, an associate professor of ethnic studies at the University of California, San Diego.

The contemporary university's implications for the future organization of labor

Kathryn Yusoff is Professor of Inhuman Geography at Queen Mary University of London.