This book starts from the assumption that futures thinking is difficult, yet of existential necessity. We live in times where the future of humanity is at stake. Thus, it is important to understand where the images of the future that currently circulate in our cultures and societies come from. This book is about two fields in the social sciences that explicitly concentrate on: futures studies and the sociology of the future. Informed by sociological theories, it applies bibliometric methods to describe these two fields as epistemic tribes and territories. After reflecting on the historical reasons for this bipartite academic institutionalization, the book explores how the two fields could achieve a diligent division of labor that encourages forms of futures thinking that speak to the societal and civilizational needs of our times.

How data and artificial intelligence create a new, abstract digital subject

Ideal Subjects examines how samples of our lives and daily behaviors have come to reside in the world of data and artificial intelligence-and what this means for who we are and what we may become. Detailing how AI-facilitated algorithmic prediction and data modeling make "ideal subjects" of us, Olga Goriunova explores the complex ways we relate to these digital abstractions.

As more and more of our experience is funneled through computational records and models, datafied aspects of our lives are segmented and reconfigured to operate as new entities. Rather than viewing these abstract assemblages as extensions of our selves, Goriunova encourages us to consider these products of computational processes as an entirely new kind of subject, one that is both more and less than a human.

Through close readings of contemporary digital practices and data analytics, Goriunova exposes the profound ethical, aesthetic, and political implications of producing and managing these new digital subjects. Highlighting the distinctive impact of computation on contemporary subject formation while placing the present within a history of shifting conceptions of the subject, she gives us much-needed tools for understanding how our intimate selves are rendered by the abstract entities of big data. Ideal Subjects presents an uncanny and deeply fascinating portrait of modern subjectivity in the technological age.

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Uncovering the Black Power movement's contributions to theorizing the politics of automation?

On the Eve of the Cybercultural Revolution offers a comprehensive look at the Black Power movement's theoretical work and insights into the entanglement of capitalism, technology, and racism. Drawing upon James and Grace Lee Boggs's expanded notion of the cybercultural era, Brian Bartell demonstrates how a range of artists, writers, and activists from the 1960s prefigured the wider discourse around automation and made it a central concern of their politics.

Rather than reducing automation to an isolated technical phenomenon, theorists of the Black radical tradition identified its important historical antecedents in colonialism and plantation slavery, emphasizing how the emerging cyberculture joined with issues such as the reorganization of labor, ecological harm, and racial inequality. Examining the work of Martin Luther King Jr., Noah Purifoy, the Black Panthers, and others, On the Eve of the Cybercultural Revolution outlines the new forms of social reproduction conceived outside of the dominant structures of racial capitalism.

Bartell synthesizes a wide range of source texts, including political speeches, literature, and activist archives, to show how the Black Power movement sought to create a postscarcity, more-than-capitalist economy. By shedding light on the movement's underexplored engagement with theories of technology, he provides a crucial key to understanding the historical dynamics responsible for our technocapitalist present.

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A history of cinema's role in popularizing the politics of Palestinian liberation

For decades, Arab American activists and allies have used film, video, and multimedia to mobilize support for the Palestinian cause in the United States. In this detailed history of cinema's role within the broader solidarity movement, Umayyah Cable analyzes the various strands of cinematic activism that have helped move Palestinian liberation politics from the periphery and into the mainstream.

Cable charts the shifting discourse around Palestine as it has been shaped by grassroots film production and alternative media distribution networks as well as more conventional outlets. Ranging from the circulation of educational filmstrips by the Association of Arab American University Graduates in the 1970s to the treatment of Palestinian solidarity at contemporary Hollywood awards ceremonies and film festivals, Mainstreaming Palestine tells the story of how cinema has promoted Palestinian liberation and solidarity politics. While highlighting various public controversies and struggles against censorship, Cable also acknowledges the drawbacks of the Palestinian cause being subsumed by the mainstream, discussing how activism risks becoming fashionable, undermining the radical potential of the very tools that helped bring it there.

Combining archival research, ethnographic observation and interviews, text analysis, and visual analysis of film, video, and multimedia, Mainstreaming Palestine encourages readers to critically assess the relationship between the politics of liberation and the all-consuming engine of contemporary capitalism. By underscoring the impact of visual media on the evolution of the Palestinian solidarity discourse, this book offers both a treatise on the practical power of cinema and a necessary historicization of an urgent issue in American politics.

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Uncovering Hollywood's perpetual longing for a lost industrial America

"We don't make things in America anymore": like clockwork, this refrain resurfaces in political discourse, a reflection of yearning for a bygone era of industrial productivity. In his latest work, Grant Farred uses the 1990 film Pretty Woman to expose and critique this lingering nostalgia for late-industrial capitalism.

Situating Pretty Woman alongside Reagan-era films including Wall Street, Farred examines the congealment of such a pervasive romanticized view of the United States as a fading industrial powerhouse. Drawing on an eclectic range of thinkers-from Raymond Williams and Slavoj Zizek to Mick Jagger-The Prettiest Woman offers a unique analysis of the ways Hollywood perpetuates the myth of a lost "productive America," highlighting the seductive power of this fantasy despite its disconnect from economic and political realities.

During the twentieth century, the Tigris and Euphrates rivers underwent a profound physical transformation, one that mirrored the region's political shift from imperial rule to nation-state. Here, Iraq, Syria, and Turkey took shape in the wake of the Ottoman Empire, and the two rivers became sites of economic development planning and large-scale environmental engineering. It is a modern conceit that industrial, technological societies transcend ecological change, that technology and ecology operate separately. With this book, Dale J. Stahl instead centers riverine ecologies within the context of social and political projects and shows how natural processes encounter human intentions to manage, control, or modernize.

Weaving imperial and national histories with ecological ones, Two Rivers Entangled undermines familiar accounts of the invention of states, the advance of nations, and the triumphs of technical expertise. Stahl entangles a wide range of human and nonhuman actors-knitting together the movement of engineers and bureaucrats with that of salt particles, linking the disappointment of revolutionaries to the dissolution of unreliable rock, and following the flow of water over embankments and into poetry. Ultimately, this book offers an alternative account of twentieth-century Middle Eastern history, one subject as much to ecological change as to human visions and intentions.

Who cares for parental caregivers? The short answer is, parenting groups do. Who Cares for Parents examines how parenting groups collectively build and contribute significant resources to form a broader care infrastructure for adult family caregivers with children. This book looks at the content of care parenting groups provide for parents, through comparative research including mothers, fathers, and nonbinary parents. Cases include some of the most recognizable parenting groups in the United States, some with vast networks of parent members numbering in the thousands or even millions, like the Parent Teacher Association, La Leche League, and MOMS Club International. The book also examines newer and, perhaps, less well known groups like the City Dads Group, the Upper East Side (UES) Mommas, as well as smaller sets of local dads' groups and a babysitting co-op.

Can parents in the contemporary United States secure some of the necessary resources to provide care, not only for their children but also for themselves, through parenting groups? The evidence from this research suggests they can. Parenting groups have a long history of organizing membership, meetings, education, material resources, and advocacy to provide for parents' needs. Parenting groups' ideologies and practices often seek broad goals, and sometimes include far reaching advocacy, innovative solutions, and possibilities for what Price-Glynn calls strategic parenting and social change. Alongside their successes, however, parenting groups also face challenges of producing narrow and temporary alliances, exclusion, and exacerbating inequalities. Despite their many challenges, Price-Glynn remains hopeful about the possibilities for non-familial and collective care infrastructure like that performed by parent groups.

A revealing look at the interrelationship between secret intelligence agencies and the wider societies and cultures they inhabit

Intelligence agencies are traditionally understood as cloistered entities. Hidden behind a veil of secrecy, they conduct their activities relatively free from public scrutiny, and their assessments are ideally detached from the cultural and political biases that pervade our fallen world.

Today, however, intelligence services have come in from the cold. They feature routinely in our popular culture and our political debates. Our ideas about them, from "deep state" conspiracy theories to popular tropes drawn from spy fiction and cinema, have even influenced the outcome of major elections. Likewise, as John Le Carre once put it, intelligence officers do not sit "like monks in a cell" but are themselves products of the social, political, and cultural domains they inhabit.

Spies, Culture, and Society brings together some of the world's leading experts on intelligence and its wider impact to explore different aspects of this reciprocal relationship between spies, culture, and society. The topics covered include the influence of spy films and novels, interactions between spies and journalists, the historical roots of the "deep state" conspiracy theory, Western intelligence and imperialism, and more. Together, these chapters showcase a new way of understanding intelligence agencies as fundamentally integrated into the cultures, societies, and political systems that they seek to analyze and protect.

Offering meaningful insights for intelligence studies scholars, Cold War historians, and media scholars, this collection offers a new paradigm for understanding intelligence agencies as fundamentally integrated into the cultures and societies they seek to protect.

"Black Orpheus" and the Globalization of Afro-Brazilian Culture is the first historical study in English to examine the development, production, and reception of the 1958 film Black Orpheus and its legacy in the 1960s and 1970s. It focuses on the making of the film and the trajectories of the major actors and musicians who helped construct an image of Black Brazil and provides an analysis of the globalization of Afro-Brazilian images and music in France and the United States in the wake of the movie's success. Using archival sources, interviews, and the secondary literature from France, Brazil, and the United States, this book reveals information about the cultural histories of all three countries and gives readers new insight into the trajectories of diverse actors such as Breno Mello, Marpessa Dawn, and Lea Garcia and performers such as Agostinho dos Santos, Baden Powell, and Maria D'Apparecida.

This book analyses the nature, causes, logic, and culture of prison victimisation in an English young offender institution for young men aged 18-21 years old. Drawing on ethnographic and qualitative research, this book offers a comprehensive analysis of the gendered, situational, individual, and moral components of prison victimisation. It explores how wider technological, economic, policy, political, and cultural changes have altered the texture and structure of prison life and prison violence, and with what consequences. Ultimately, the book argues that high levels of prison violence are not inevitable. Rather, the prevention of prison violence requires a just, lawful, humane, and hopeful environment, and failing to create such is tragically life-changing for young prisoners.

At the time Jimmy Carter was inaugurated as the 39th president of the United States, the Democratic Party had been enjoying a half-century of sustained electoral advantage. It had long controlled Congress and dominated measures of party identification. When Carter defeated Gerald Ford in 1976, 40% of Americans called themselves Democrats and another 12% told survey takers they leaned towards the party. To win the election of 1976, Carter just needed to hold the voters that started out on his side. Nearly fifty years later, American politics has inverted itself. Close electoral competition is the norm, and politics are at a stalemate. Brady and Parker call the existing deadlock the era of party parity, an age of division unseen since the late-nineteenth century. This book explains this profound shift in electoral politics. Drawing on fresh datasets and long-running surveys, the authors trace the decline of the Democratic majority and consider how this decline differed from past realignments. They show why modern American presidential elections are always close and argue that the rise of Donald Trump largely reinforced preexisting trends. Their work represents a significant contribution to the scholarly literature on party identification and realignment.

Proposing a radical reconceptualization of deconstruction and nothingness

The first of two volumes exploring Jacques Derrida's prefiguration of speculative realism, The Nothing and Nothingness examines the transcendental naturalism of Ray Brassier and Iain Hamilton Grant and the speculative materialism of Quentin Meillassoux. Philippe Lynes proposes nothing less than a radical reconceptualization of deconstruction as a call to bear witness to nothingness: let the earth be the earth, let nature be nature, and leave them to their reality, secrecy, and withdrawal without us.

Dearth: Deconstruction After Speculative Realism argues that Derrida's seminars on Martin Heidegger and Maurice Blanchot, La Chose (The Thing), anticipated many of the philosophical, literary, and aesthetic questions animating speculative realism today: an anti-anthropocentric critique of Kantian correlationism an overcoming of the apocalyptic nihilism of extinction through a deeper, affirmative habituation to nothingness and poignant reflections on the literary and poetic aspects of living and dying in impossible worlds. His is an anti-correlationist plea that resounds now more urgently than ever.

The Banyamulenge Soldier offers a critical analysis of combatant experiences from within the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) and subsequent armed groups through the interpretation of Banyamulenge soldier narratives. Banyamulenge young men joined the RPF and acted as foot soldiers in the RPF's fight against the genocidaire in 1994 and later conflicts, becoming active agents of conflict in the region up to the present. In examining the highly political discourse and stories around the Rwandan conflict and Congo wars, this book examines RPF memory, the evolution of its uses of violence, and how these memories have shaped Banyamulenge combatants.

Challenging the preconceived perpetrator and victim categories with a forward-thinking approach using the concept of genocide narrative identity-meaning a narrative identity shaped by experiences of social destruction or uses of genocide as a concept-Christopher P. Davey reveals how the stories we tell about ourselves shapes who we are. He shows that Banyamulenge experiences of genocide between Congo and Rwanda are layered around agencies of victimhood and perpetration of genocide. Using soldier and other community narratives, Davey examines the subjective nature of genocide in perception of an event, strategic deployment of the label, and in the (re)shaping of social worlds inhabited by this community and therefore impacting others in Congo and Rwanda. The Banyamulenge Soldier offers an insider view of the historical dynamics of current conflicts in South Kivu while adding to our understanding of relational genocide theory.

The untold story of how America's brightest academic minds revolutionized intelligence analysis at the CIA

In the early days of the Cold War, the United States faced a crisis in intelligence analysis. A series of intelligence failures in 1949 and 1950, including the failure to warn about the North Korean invasion of South Korea, made it clear that gut instinct and traditional practices were no longer sufficient for intelligence analysis in the nuclear age. The new director of the Central Intelligence Agency, Walter Bedell Smith, had a mandate to reform it.

Based on new archival research in declassified documents and the participants' personal papers, The Intelligence Intellectuals reveals the neglected history of how America's brightest academic minds were recruited by the CIA to revolutionize intelligence analysis during this critical period. Peter C. Grace describes how the scientifically sound analysis methods that they introduced significantly helped the United States gain an advantage in the Cold War, and these new analysts legitimized the role of the recently created CIA in the national security community. Grace demonstrates how these professors-such as William Langer from Harvard, Sherman Kent from Yale, and Max Millikan from MIT-developed systematic approaches to intelligence analysis that shaped the CIA's methodology for decades to come.

Readers interested in the history of the Cold War and in intelligence, scholars of intelligence studies, Cold War historians, and intelligence practitioners seeking to understand their craft's foundations will all value this insightful history about the place of social science in national security.

The intensified securitization of the borderlands between Europe and the Middle East/North Africa over the past decade has turned the Mediterranean Sea into a graveyard. This book delves into the most vulnerable, yet understudied, area of the EU's anti-immigrant security regime: the port cities in border zones on major refugee routes. Turam shifts the predominant focus from the global scale of fear to the urban scale of native-migrant solidarity in Greece and Sicily-Europe's two major entrance points in the East and Central Mediterranean. Building upon a rapidly growing scholarship on emotional geographies and affective geopolitics, Turam brings emotions to the center and emphasizes their role in forming, transforming, contesting, interrupting, and even evading the securitization of migration. Within the context of rising racism, nativism, and Islamophobia, readers will discover surprising and inspiring acts of day-to-day resistance to securitization empowered by a sense of safety and local trust, as well as cooperation between municipalities, pro-migrant locals, and asylum-seekers. Uncovering how racialized migrants become the catalyst of transformation from the violent legacy of borderlands to peaceful resistance, the ethnography reveals how intense emotions affect pro-migrant practices, contribute to the formation of safe places, and open the way for dynamic Black and Muslim migrant activism and solidarity at Europe's racial borders.

This book offers a policy analysis of the emergence of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) through the lens of John Kingdon's Multiple Streams Framework. Drawing on 32 expert interviews with key stakeholders-including EU institution representatives (such as trilogue negotiators), member states, industry leaders, NGOs, and journalists-the author provides a deep dive into the decision-making process behind the regulation. Additionally, the study examines 462 position papers from the EU Commission's consultation phases (2009-2011) to uncover the factors that shaped the adoption of the GDPR. At its core, this work explores the 'window of opportunity' that enabled the regulation's adoption.

This book examines the representation of migrants and the European Union (EU) in the Romanian and British press, adopting a Critical Discourse Analysis approach to analyse a corpus of newspaper articles published between 1^st January 2006 and 31^st December 2018. The analysis reveals that through conceptual metaphors, migrants were likened to objects, ships, illegal goods, waves, flows, liquids, invaders, enemies and threats. The key themes identified in the analysis are the quantification and the 'otherisation' of migrants, as well as their portrayal as economic burdens or invaders in their destination countries. With regard to the EU, the author explores how both countries' memberships have followed different trajectories than those of other member states, ever since their accession to the EU bloc. The novelty of this research lies in the diachronic comparison of the representations of migrants and the European Union in Romania, a country characterised by emigration, versus the United Kingdom, a country characterised by immigration. This volume will be of interest to academics and students concerned with issues to do with migration and the EU, including those in fields such as political communication, migration policy, sociology of migration, and the language of media.

A new framework for analyzing global power dynamics and the neglected role of small states

In the decades since the Cold War, international relations scholarship has predominantly examined global power dynamics through the lens of great powers-namely, the United States-and rising powers such as China. This narrow focus overlooks small states, which are a critical component of the international system. As global power structures rapidly evolve and traditional alliances become increasingly fluid, understanding how small states strategically position themselves is crucial.

Small States in a Shifting International Order provides a fresh examination of how these states navigate complex geopolitical landscapes. Drawing on case studies of diverse small countries-the Baltic states, Costa Rica, Denmark, Ghana, Jordan, Nepal, and Sweden-the book's international group of contributors reveals the sophisticated foreign policy strategies that enable these states to pursue their security interests amid significant power asymmetries and the shifting international order. By demonstrating how these small states are not merely passive actors but also active architects of their strategic environments, this volume provides a groundbreaking framework for analyzing international relations in an era of unprecedented complexity and interconnectedness.

Scholars and advanced students of international relations will find this book to be an invaluable resource that transforms our understanding of global politics.

This textbook provides a comprehensive introduction for individuals who are new to the discipline of International Relations or World Politics. It features three distinctive elements. First, it posits that understanding the international political economy is essential before delving into analyses of war and security, emphasizing that economic interdependence, arising from international cooperation, is a central theme in international relations. Second, the textbook recognizes that strategic interaction - where the decisions of one entity and future outcomes depend on the choices of another - is a core component of international relations. It also utilizes four key concepts in its exploration of the field: Us and Others, Disparity and Dissatisfaction, Trust and Distrust, and Legitimacy and Illegitimacy. Lastly, the textbook is attuned to the methodologies of the Social Sciences, including descriptive, causal, and deductive inferences, and it stands out for its commitment to fostering methodological awareness.

The oceans are not just vast expanses of blue, but dynamic political spaces shaped by complex regional dynamics. In this fascinating study, the authors advance a novel analytical framework for the study of the politics of global ocean regions. They shed new light on the complex interactions in ocean spaces such as the Arctic, Indo-Pacific or Indian Ocean. Written by leading experts in different ocean regions, the book demonstrates how important, yet diverse and complex regional maritime politics are. Its emphasis on the emergence, organization, and effects of global ocean regions provides a useful framework for guiding future research. The book will be essential reading for students and analysts interested in regionalism, the oceans, and the governance of global commons.

This book analyses and discusses from a philosophical perspective the concepts of health, well-being and quality of life in contemporary biomedical research. The guiding idea of the book is that different concepts of health, well-being, and quality of life lead to different types of projects, actions and policies, both at the individual and institutional level. For this reason, it is important to analyse them and make them clear, in their interweaving of objective dimensions (the facts) and evaluative dimensions (the values).

This study analyzes the Soviet Union's strategic interests and policies toward Mongolia, emphasizing Joseph Stalin's perception of its geopolitical importance. It examines why Mongolia's independence was a key condition Stalin set at the Yalta Summit for the Soviet declaration of war on Japan. While existing research has explored Soviet-Mongolian relations, this study utilizes newly declassified archival materials from Russia, Mongolia, and Japan to reassess Stalin's strategic vision and interactions with Mongolian leaders. The research argues that Soviet policy was primarily driven by economic interests, with political considerations playing a secondary role. It also highlights the alignment between Mongolian national aspirations and Russian strategic objectives, particularly since the 1910s. By incorporating previously unexamined sources, this study offers a more nuanced understanding of Soviet-Mongolian relations and Mongolia's role in Soviet Far Eastern strategy, shedding light on its historical path to sovereignty and its significance in regional power dynamics.