Stephen Duncombe

Maxwell Tremblay

A book that includes photos, song lyrics, letters and articles looks at the role of race in the history of punk rock, in a book that covers everyone from The Clash to Bad Brains to The Sex Pistols. Original.

Punk Rock and the Politics of Race

White Riot

Traces the history of zine publishing from its origins by science fiction cults, its growth with the 1960s counter culture, and its attachment to punk rock

Zines and the Politics of Alternative Culture

Notes from Underground

Re-imagining Progressive Politics in an Age of Fantasy

Because I Was Flesh

What practical lessons can we learn from corporate theme parks, ad campaigns, video games, celebrity culture and Las Vegas? Can such examples of popular fantasy help us define and make possible a new political future? This is the case for a progressive political strategy that embraces a new set of tools. Although fantasy and spectacle have become the lingua franca of our time, Duncombe points out that liberals continue to depend upon sober reason to guide them. Instead, they need to learn how to communicate in today's spectacular vernacular.

Dream

Saint Thomas More

The Open Utopia is a complete English language edition of Thomas More's Utopia that honors the primary precept of Utopia itself: that all property is common property. Licensed under Creative Commons, The Open Utopia conveys this message and continues the tradition. But Utopia is more than the story of a far-off land with no private property. It's a text that instructs us how to approach texts, be they literary or political, in an open manner: open to criticism, open to participation, and open to re-creation. Utopia is no-place, and therefore it is up to all of us to imagine it. Opinion polls, volatile voting patterns, and street protests demonstrate widespread dissatisfaction with the current system, yet the popular response so far has largely been limited to the angry outcries. But negation, by itself, affects nothing. The dominant system doesn't dominate because people agree with it; it rules because we're convinced there is no alternative. We need to be able to imagine a radical alternative - a Utopia - yet we are haunted by the disasters of "actually existing" Utopias of the past century, from fascism to authoritarian socialism. In this re-issue of Thomas More's generative volume, scholar and activist Stephen Duncombe re-imagines Utopia as an open text, one designed by More as an imaginal machine freeing us from the tyranny of the present while undermining master plans for the future. In this volume Utopia is re-imagined and brought into the participatory digital age as a technology for undermining authority and facilitating new imagination.

Open Utopia

Steve Lambert

The Art of Activism is an all-purpose guide to artistic activism, combining the creative power of the arts to move us emotionally with the strategic planning of activism necessary to bring about social change. With contemporary case studies and historical examples, chapters on cultural and cognitive theory, sections on what can be learned from unlikely sources like popular culture and marketing techniques, along with investigations into ethics and evaluation, explorations of the creative process and the importance of utopian thinking, and an attached workbook with over fifty exercises to practice, the co-founders of the Center for Artistic Activism take readers step-by-step through the process of becoming, or becoming even better, artistic activists.

Your All-Purpose Guide to Making the Impossible Possible

The Art of Activism

An invaluable scholarly resource and a tool for political activists.

Cultural Resistance Reader

Andrew Mattson

Media Studies: A Reader introduces a full range of theoretical perspectives through which the media may be explored, analyzed, critiqued, and understood. Media Studies: A Reader includes essential essays from writers such as Raymond Williams, Stuart Hall, Marshall McLuhan, Jürgen Habermas, Jean Baudrillard, and Michel Foucault, whose work was central to forming the field. It also includes wide ranging work on current media formations from key contemporary theorists, including Paul Gilroy, Angela McRobbie, and Nick Couldry. Finally, Media Studies: A Reader looks to the future, exploring new media formations and their significance through the work of Mark Andrejevic, Lev Manovitch, Jonathan Sterne, Janice Radway, Ien Ang, David Morley, Linda Williams, and others. The sixty-seven readings are divided into two main parts. “Studying the Media” begins with a section on key theoretical perspectives and follows this with five sections opening up questions around the Public Sphere, Representation, Feminism and Gender, Audiences, and Everyday Life. The second part, “Case Studies,” brings together concrete examples of how theoretical approaches can be realized through a series of case studies, covering, for instance, reality TV, news, advertising, and new media. With easy-to-follow introductions and guides to further reading accompanying each section, Media Studies: A Reader equips the student to engage with key debates in the field. With over 60% new material, this new edition updates all sections with a rich selection of contemporary writing complementing media studies classics. In addition, further reading lists have been comprehensively updated and introductory essays to each section have been expanded and re-written.

Stephen Duncombe

Books

Your next favorite book is out there