Tag: Materialism

Feminist New Materialism, Girlhood, and the School Ball


Free Download Toni Ingram, "Feminist New Materialism, Girlhood, and the School Ball "
English | ISBN: 1350165727 | 2023 | 186 pages | EPUB, PDF | 4 MB + 8 MB
Engaging with feminist new materialism, Toni Ingram reveals the ways in which the school ball (or prom) can be understood as an assemblage of material objects, spaces, practices, ideas and imaginings which contribute to the process of becoming school ball-girl. The ball-girl is not a fixed identity or subject but is an intra-active becoming – a dynamic, shifting process where bodies, sexuality and femininities are relationally produced. (Re)conceptualising the school ball-girl as emergent phenomena provides openings for thinking about girls and this schooling practice beyond popular cultural narratives. Building on the social theory of Barad, Bennett, Best, Deleuze and Guattari, this book offers a new perspective on girls, sexuality, gender and schooling, while also exploring the potential of feminist new materialisms for rethinking educational practices and the human subject.

(more…)

Karen Barad’s Feminist Materialism


Free Download David Harris, "Karen Barad’s Feminist Materialism"
English | ISBN: 1527596095 | 2023 | 205 pages | PDF | 1347 KB
This book discusses the prodigious output of one of the most influential proponents of social theory, Professor Karen Barad. Her work attracts a wide readership in feminist theory and politics, philosophy and science studies, and she pursues a particular interdisciplinary approach―"diffraction"―to pursue links and connections between these disciplines. Her new terminology, including terms like "intra-action", has been widely explored and applied. She shows how these terms have been developed from her interest in quantum theory, especially the work of Niels Böhr. This book is an "immanent critique", exploring the processes by which different academic concerns and schools have been connected and treated as examples of a very general account of how the whole universe works, which Barad terms "agential realism". There is no intention here to reject or dismiss these arguments, to replace them with a rival account, or to adopt some detached "objective" stance, although any alternatives which occur during the process are acknowledged and briefly discussed. The main objective in this book is to consider the consistency of Barad’s arguments and how they have been used in actual discussions. Some of the supporting work, by other authors like Haraway, Kirby, Schrader and Ziarek, is also considered in six chapters covering the quantum world, animals and machines as nonhuman agents, social relations as intra-actions, diffraction as a method, and general philosophical underpinnings.

(more…)

In the Tracks of Historical Materialism


Free Download Perry Anderson, "In the Tracks of Historical Materialism"
English | 1983 | pages: 116 | ISBN: 0860917762, 0226017885 | EPUB | 0,3 mb
What have been the major changes in the intellectual landscape of the left since the mid seventies? Have they on balance represented an emancipation or a retreat for socialist culture as a whole? In the Tracks of Historical Materialism looks at some of the paradoxes in the evolution of Marxist thought in this period. It starts by considering the remarkable and variegated growth of historical materialism in the Anglo-American world, spreading across a broad field from history to economics, politics to literature, sociology to philosophy. By contrast, the same years have seen a drastic recession of Marxist influences in the Latin cultures where it was traditionally strong-France or Italy. Its main theoretical challengers there proved to be successive forms of structuralism and post-structuralism. The common coordinates of these-tracing the outer bounds of the work of Levi-Strauss or Lacan, Foucault or Derrida-are surveyed and criticized, in the light of the inherent limitations of the language model from which they derived. In Germany, on the other hand, the theoretical scene has been largely dominated by the accumulating work of Habermas, with its roots in the Frankfurt School. Yet Habermas’s philosophy also reveals unexpected affinities with the trend of prevalent Parisian concerns, in its unifying emphasis on communication-while at the same time diverging from them in the constancy of its political commitments. The historical background of international class struggles against which these variant fates of Marxism in the west were played out is then explored, with special attention to the interconnection between the destinies of Maoism and Eurocommunism. What, finally, is the nature of the relationship between Marxism as a theory and socialism as a goal? A conclusion reviews the wider issues posed for the labour movement by the rise of the peace movement and the women’s movement, and suggests a range of priorities for the further development of Marxist thought in the eighties.

(more…)