Blurb for my forthcoming book: A Stubborn Fury: How Writing Works in Elitist Britain

Below is the blurb for my new book, which is forthcoming from Open Humanities Press in the MEDIA : ART: WRITE : NOW, edited by Joanna Zylinska.

Gary Hall,  A Stubborn Fury: How Writing Works in Elitist Britain

Two fifths of Britain’s leading people were educated privately: that’s five times the amount as in the population as a whole, with almost a quarter graduating from Oxford or Cambridge. Eight private schools send more pupils to Oxbridge than the remaining 2894 state schools combined, making modern Britain one of the most unequal places in Europe.

In A Stubborn Fury Gary Hall offers a powerful and provocative look at the consequences of this inequality for English culture in particular. Focusing on the literary novel and the memoir, he investigates, in terms that are as insightful as they are irreverent, why so much writing in England is uncritically realist, humanist and anti-intellectual. Hall does so by playfully rewriting two of the most acclaimed contributions to these media genres of recent times. One is that of England’s foremost avant-garde novelist Tom McCarthy, and the importance he attaches to European modernism and antihumanist theory. The other is that of the celebrated French memoirists Didier Eribon and Édouard Louis, and their attempt to reinvent the antihumanist philosophical tradition by producing a theory that speaks about class and intersectionality, yet generates the excitement of a Kendrick Lamar concert. By experimentally pirating McCarthy, Eribon and Louis, Hall addresses that most urgent of questions: what can be done about English literary culture’s addiction to the worldview of privileged, middle-class white men, very much to the exclusion of more radically inventive writing, including that of working-class, BAME and LGBTQIAP+ authors?

In Masked Media, a follow-up to A Stubborn Fury which is also due to be published in the MEDIA : ART: WRITE : NOW series, Hall proceeds to show how our ways of writing and working can be reinvented to produce a more socially just future after the years of austerity and the coronavirus pandemic.

Like all Open Humanities Press books, A Stubborn Fury will be freely available to download.

Sin criterios: Spanish translation of Steven Shaviro's Without Criteria: Kant, Whitehead, Deleuze available from Open Humanities Press

Dear Friends,

We are pleased to announce the latest in Graham Harman and Bruno Latour's New Metaphysics series: the Spanish translation of Steven Shaviro's Sin criterios: Kant, Whitehead, Deleuze y la Estética. Traducción de Román Suárez y Laureano Ralón. (Originally published as Steven Shaviro, Without Criteria: Kant, Whitehead, Deleuze, and Aesthetics by MIT Press in 2009.)

Like all Open Humanities Press books, Sin criterios is freely available to download:

http://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/titles/sin-criterios/

En Sin Criterios, Steven Shaviro nos propone explorar una fantasía filosófica: imaginar un mundo en el que Alfred North Whitehead toma el lugar de Martin Heidegger. ¿Qué habría pasado si Whitehead, en vez de Heidegger, hubiese fijado la agenda del pensamiento posmoderno? Mientras que Heidegger pregunta: “¿Por qué hay algo y no más bien nada?”, Whitehead pregunta: “¿Cómo es que siempre hay algo nuevo?” Shaviro argumenta que, en un mundo donde prácticamente todo –desde la música popular al ADN– está siendo sampleado y recombinado, la pregunta de Whitehead es sin duda la más urgente. Sin Criterios es un experimento que trata de repensar la teoría posmoderna, especialmente la teoría estética, desde una perspectiva que nos conduce a Whitehead en lugar de Heidegger. Al trabajar con las ideas de Whitehead y de Deleuze, Shaviro también recupera a Kant, argumentando que ciertos aspectos del pensamiento kantiano preparan el terreno para el “constructivismo” filosófico adoptado por Whitehead y Deleuze.

Kant, Whitehead y Deleuze no siempre aparecen juntos en un mismo grupo, pero la yuxtaposición que encontramos en Sin Criterios nos ayuda a esclarecer una diversidad de temas de interés para las prácticas artísticas y mediáticas contemporáneas. Traducción de Román Suárez y Laureano Ralón. 

Sobre el autor

Steven Shaviro is DeRoy Professor of English at Wayne State University. He is the author of Passion and Excess: Blanchot, Bataille, and Literary Theory, The Cinematic Body and The Universe of Things: On Speculative Realism.

 

Traductores

Laureano Ralón es licenciado y magíster en ciencias de la comunicación por la Simon Fraser University, becario de CONACYT y estudiante avanzado de doctorando en filosofía por la Universidad de San Nicolás de Hidalgo y la Universidad Libre de Bruselas.

Román Suárez es licenciado y magíster en filosofía por la Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, becario de CONACYT y estudiante avanzado de doctorando en filosofía por la Universidad de San Nicolás de Hidalgo.

 

Diseño de la colección

El diseño de la colección Nueva metafísica fue realizado por Katherine Gillieson con ilustraciones de Tammy Lu.

With our best wishes,

Sigi Jöttkandt, David Ottina, Gary Hall (for OHP Press) 

Midlands 4 Cities PhD Studentships with the Centre for Postdigital Cultures

The Centre for Postdigital Cultures (CPC) at Coventry University invites Expressions of Interest from prospective PhD students, with view to a starting date of September 2021 (submission deadline is Wednesday 30th September 2020):

https://www.coventry.ac.uk/research/areas-of-research/postdigital-cultures/m4c-studentships-with-the-centre-for-postdigital-cultures/

We are offering to support the development of PhD proposals for the AHRC M4C (Midlands 4 Cities) consortium fully funded bursary scheme (https://www.midlands4cities.ac.uk/midlands4cities.aspx).

These prestigious, competitive studentships offer a fee waiver and a maintenance grant for 3.5 years (full time) or 7 years (part time), as well as access to unparalleled training, additional funding and networking opportunities.

Although we will support the development of your proposal we cannot guarantee your success. All applications are assessed by the consortium committee and it is a highly competitive process.

You will need to make an application for PhD study via the Coventry University platform PGR+ (https://pgrplus.coventry.ac.uk/).

In the section for the research proposal please state that this is an ‘EOI for M4C Studentship at the Centre for Postdigital Cultures’. 

•     1000 words (max) statement providing a short description of your planned PhD project, including key bibliographical/artistic references;
•     500 words (max) explaining why you would like to do your PhD at the CPC (potential supervisory team members that might have attracted you to our Faculty Research Centre);
•     500 words (max) resume, detailing your background (be it academic, professional, or both) and explaining why it is relevant to this project.

 In case you have previous experience which you deem relevant to the project (publications, artworks, etc), please feel free to add your CV and images of your work, if appropriate.

Please note that the submission deadline is Wednesday 30th September 2020.

About the Centre for Postdigital Cultures

The CPC investigates alternative forms for society in the 21st century. Exploring issues of collaboration, community, and the commons, the Centre facilitates new articulations of culture that call for a radical rethinking of the relationship between the human, technology, economy and the environment. Along with conventional arts and humanities methods, we support PhD projects adopting a range of mixed methods, including various practice-orientated methodologies, visual argumentation, case studies and ethnography.

We encourage applications from suitably qualified candidates keen on developing a doctoral research in any of the following research areas:

• Digital Arts, Humanities and Posthumanities
• Affirmative Disruption and Open Media
• Data Cities and the Politics of Care
• Art, Space and the City
• Postdigital Intimacies
• Immersive Cultures and International Heritage
• AI and Algorithmic Cultures

Further information about the Centre and our staff are available on our website (https://www.coventry.ac.uk/research/areas-of-research/postdigital-cultures/).

For an overview of our PGR offer please see our Study With Us pages (https://www.coventry.ac.uk/research/areas-of-research/postdigital-cultures/study-with-us-pdc/).

Prospective PGRs are eligible for this studentship if based in the UK or EU and if they have an MA qualification (or nearing completion), or relevant professional experience.

Please note that candidates who do not meet the eligibility criteria for M4C PhD funding scheme, but who are interested in PhD study at the Centre for Postdigital Cultures, are encouraged to contact Prof. Mel Jordan (mel.jordan@coventry.ac.uk) and Dr. Miriam De Rosa (miriam.derosa@coventry.ac.uk). We welcome applications from all sectors of the community and we encourage those currently under-represented in the Centre to apply.

Deterritorializing the Future: Heritage in, of and after the Anthropocene - new open access book from Open Humanities Press

Dear friends,

This month we're delighted to announce the latest - and last - in our Critical Climate Change series, aptly titled Deterritorializing the Future: Heritage in, of and after the Anthropocene, edited by Rodney Harrison and Colin Sterling.

Like all Open Humanities Press books, Deterritorializing the Future is freely available to download:

http://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/titles/deterritorializing-the-future/

Understanding how pasts resource presents is a fundamental first step towards building alternative futures in the Anthropocene. This collection brings together scholars from a range of disciplines to explore concepts of care, vulnerability, time, extinction, loss and inheritance across more-than-human worlds, connecting contemporary developments in the posthumanities with the field of critical heritage studies. Drawing on contributions from archaeology, anthropology, critical heritage studies, gender studies, geography, histories of science, media studies, philosophy, and science and technology studies, the book aims to place concepts of heritage at the centre of discussions of the Anthropocene and its associated climate and extinction crises – not as a nostalgic longing for how things were, but as a means of expanding collective imaginations and thinking critically and speculatively about the future and its alternatives.

Contributors

Christina Fredengren, Cecilia Åsberg, Anna Bohlin, Adrian Van Allen, Esther Breithoff, Rodney Harrison, Colin Sterling, Joanna Zylinska, Denis Byrne, J. Kelechi Ugwuanyi, Caitlin DeSilvey, Anatolijs Venovcevs, Anna Storm and Claire Colebrook.

‘Deterritorializing The Future is without doubt a major contribution to Critical Heritage Studies, and also has significant resonances beyond this emerging field. Anyone concerned with the art of living in ecologically precarious times, anyone who cares about the entanglement of the human and the nonhuman and their planetary legacies needs to read this book.’

Ben Dibley, Institute for Culture and Society, Western Sydney University

About the editors

Rodney Harrison is Professor of Heritage Studies at the UCL Institute of Archaeology, and Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) Heritage Priority Area Leadership Fellow (2017-2020). He has experience working in, teaching and researching natural and cultural heritage conservation, management and preservation in the UK, Europe, Australia, North America and South America. He is the (co) author or (co) editor of 17 books and guest edited journal volumes and over 80 peer reviewed journal articles and book chapters and is the founding editor of the Journal of Contemporary Archaeology. Between 2015 and 2019 he was principal investigator on the AHRC funded Heritage Futures research programme www.heritage-futures.org. His research has been funded by AHRC, GCRF/UKRI, British Academy, Wenner-Gren Foundation, Australian Research Council, Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies and the European Commission.

Colin Sterling is an AHRC Early Career Leadership Fellow at the UCL Institute of Archaeology. His research investigates the ideas and practices of heritage from a range of theoretical and historical perspectives, with a core focus on critical-creative approaches to heritage making. He is currently writing a book with Rodney Harrison on more-than-human heritage in the Anthropocene, which aims to expand the framework of critical heritage studies to better address the urgent problems of a warming world. Colin was previously a Project Curator at the Royal Institute of British Architects and has worked as a heritage consultant internationally, specializing in curatorial planning, audience research and interpretation. His first monograph Heritage, Photography, and the Affective Past was published by Routledge in 2019. He has a long-standing interest in the relationship between art and heritage, and is currently working on a new project investigating the impact of experiential and immersive design across the heritage sector.

-----------------

Exit the Critical Climate Change series (pursued by a polar bear)

http://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/series/critical-climate-change/

Enter the CCC2, Critical Climate Chaos series - Irreversibility

http://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/series/ccc2-irreversibility/

With our best wishes,

Sigi Jöttkandt, David Ottina, Gary Hall (for OHP Press)

Machine Sensation, by Tessa G. Leach - available open access

Open Humanities Press is delighted to announce the latest title in Graham Harman and Bruno Latour’s  New Metaphysics series: 

Machine Sensation: Anthropomorphism and ‘Natural’ Interaction with Nonhumans, by Tessa G. Leach

Like all Open Humanities Press books, Machine Sensation is available for free:  

http://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/titles/machine-sensation/

Emphasising the alien qualities of anthropomorphic technologies, Machine Sensation makes a conscious effort to increase rather than decrease the tension between nonhuman and human experience. In a series of rigorously executed cases studies, including natural user interfaces, artificial intelligence as well as sex robots, Leach shows how object-oriented ontology enables one to insist upon the unhuman nature of technology while acknowledging its immense power and significance in human life. Machine Sensation meticulously engages OOO, Actor Network Theory, the philosophy of technology, cybernetics and posthumanism in innovative and gripping ways.. 

Author Bio

Dr Tessa Leach completed her PhD in history & philosophy of technology at the University of Melbourne in 2018. Her work exists at an intersection of metaphysics, the history and philosophy of technology, science and technology studies, videogames studies, gender studies, queer STS, and animal ethology.