politics
Whither emergence?
The word ‘emerging’ is usually associated with countries that have opened their doors to growth-oriented capitalism but are yet to catch up with the supposedly developed world. This idea of emergence, however, reinforces hierarchical oppositions that deem some cultures less advanced than others and imposes an order that is already in crisis. This special issue, instead, draws on emergence to put into question the normative distinctions that inform our ways of being in the world and to (re-)imagine alternatives.
Against wasted politics: A critique of the circular economy
It’s a true story … being a young intellectual, I wanted desperately to get away, see something different … I was on a small boat … the fishermen went out in their frail crafts at their own risk. It was this risk, this danger, which I loved to share … One day, then, as we were waiting for the moment to pull in the nets, a fisherman known as Petit-Jean … pointed out to me something floating on the surface of the waves. It was a small can, a sardine can.
Open issue
Issue editors: Ekaterina Chertkovskaya and Ozan Nadir Alakavuklar
ephemera welcomes open submissions, outside of special issues, that address themes relating to the theory and politics in organization.
Open issue
Issue editors: Matthew Allen, Stephen Dunne and Katie Sullivan
ephemera welcomes open submissions, outside of special issues, that address themes relating to the theory and politics in organization.
Can democracy survive austerity?
Armin Schafer and Wolfgang Streeck, two scholars at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies in Cologne, Germany, have edited a remarkable volume that attempts to address a political-economic touchstone of modern democratic-capitalism: how to reconcile democratic political processes with the increasing governance of global economic life by economic institutions – corporate and transnational governmental – that are politically nonresponsive to the demands of ordinary citizens and which are dedicated to often unpopular economic policies of austerity (cf. Edsall, 2012).
The politics of workers' inquiry
This issue brings together a series of commentaries, interventions and projects centred on the theme of workers’ inquiry. Workers’ inquiry is a practice of knowledge production that seeks to understand the changing composition of labour and its potential for revolutionary social transformation. It is a practice of turning the tools of the social sciences into weapons of class struggle. It also seeks to map the continuing imposition of the class relation, not as a disinterested investigation, but rather to deepen and intensify social and political antagonisms.
Consumption of work and the work of consumption
Issue Editors: Ekaterina Chertkovskaya, Rashné Limki and Bernadette Loacker
The politics of consumption
This age of austerity comes on the back of a lengthened period of apparently rampant consumer excess: that was a party for which we are all now having to pay. A spectacular period of unsustainably funded over-indulgence, it seems, has now given rise to a sobering period of barely fundable mere-subsistence. Consumption, narrated along such lines, is a sin which has to be paid for. Beyond the deceptive theology of consumption, however, lies actual politics.
Between the event and democratic materialism
Bruno Bosteels, Professor of Romance Studies at the University of Cornell, has translated into English Theory of the subject (Badiou, 2009a) and Wittgenstein's anti-philosophy (Badiou, 2011). Additionally, he has written a number of significant articles and essays on Alain Badiou, including ‘Post-Maoism: Badiou and Politics’ (2005), Badiou or the restarting of dialectical materialism (2007), Alain Badiou: A polemical trajectory (2009a). He is therefore one of the best specialists of Badiou within the Anglophone academy.
