Stanford University Press Blog

Year-End Staff Picks (Part II)

Take 40% off of our staff picks—and 25% off everything else on our site!

by THE STANFORD PRESS STAFF

 

To celebrate the end of the year we’ve picked out a few of our favorite titles to share with you. Browse all of our staff picks here and stay tuned to the blog for more posts explaining why we love these books. All of our recommended books, including those below, are now 40% off—and everything else on our site is 25% off through the first week of January!

 

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The National Park to Come »

by MARGRET GREBOWICZ

RECOMMENDED BY:
Marthine Satris, Associate Editor

Walking onto the National Seashore lands bordering my hometown always felt like trespassing, but also like possession. The National Parks are both wilderness and tourist destination, belonging to everyone and to no one, writes Margaret Grebowicz in The National Park to Come. Even more, they disrupt politics, environmentalism, and ideas of home. A great read to reorient your vision of the National Park Service, one hundred years after its founding!

Politicizing Debt

In the wake of the Ghost Ship and other tragedies, feminist economics may offer a way forward.

a Q&A with ANNIE McCLANAHAN and CASSIE THORNTON

An image from the Mystery Hands project.

This post is Part II of a two-part blog series exploring the culture of debt. View Part I here.

Cassie Thornton’s art suggests that any political revolution around meeting our basic needs without recourse to debt will necessarily be a feminist one. All her art projects—both individual and collective—are presented as products of “the FED”: not the Federal Reserve, but the “Feminist Economics Department.” Her view aligns with that of feminist, anti-globalization activist, and writer Sylvia Federici who identifies the politics of housing, care, and education as part of the politics of reproduction, an explicitly feminist politics. In a 2010 interview Federici called for a “radical movement that programmatically places at the center of its struggle the eradication of social inequalities and the eradication of the divisions between production and reproduction, school and home, school and community.”

Visualizing Debt

A conceptual artist critiques capitalism by foregrounding children’s perspectives on debt.

by ANNIE McCLANAHAN

An image from Debt: Bad Spelling, an Adult Problem.

This post is Part I of a two-part blog series exploring the culture of debt. View Part II here.

The link between unpaid debt and the uncertain future of “our children” is everywhere. We especially see it in discussions of the national debt, which Democrats and Republicans both insist that we pay off in the name of the nation’s children and grandchildren. And in discussions of consumer debt, we also find a link between debt, children, and shame, as when financial planning guru Suze Orman describes debt as a failure of personal will akin to addiction or obesity and insists that it is “irresponsible” for those in debt to have children. Both of these very contemporary ways of talking about debt recall debt’s much older association of debt with sin, guilt, and shame (as in the Aramaic, from which we get a line like the Christian Lord’s Prayer’s “Forgive us our debts,” or as in the German schuld, the word for both debt and guilt).

Typically, the attempt to connect the innocent child to shameful debt is creditor-ideology of the purest kind.

Typically, the attempt to connect the innocent child to shameful debt is creditor-ideology of the purest kind: a way to encourage state austerity in the case of the national debt; a way to ensure that people commit to unending attempts to pay off their personal debt on the consumer side. But artist Cassie Thornton’s brilliant installations on kids and debt offer something radically different from this creditor-ideology. Her ongoing project, Mystery Hands, includes both a children’s book and an immersive installation that, according to Thornton, “invites kids to learn about the ‘financialization’ of their world so they can imagine alternatives.” Thornton describes her book and the installation as a way to ask how a child experiences debt and to explore the consequences of “being raised and instructed by the scared silence of overleveraged adults with no time for play, with diminished access to basic material needs.”

Year-End Staff Picks (Part I)

Take 40% off of our staff picks—and 25% off everything else on our site!

by THE STANFORD PRESS STAFF

 

To celebrate the end of the year we’ve picked out a few of our favorite titles to share with you. Browse all of our staff picks here and stay tuned to the blog for more posts explaining why we love these books. All of our recommended books, including those below, are now 40% off—and everything else on our site is 25% off through the first week of January!

 

1

The Manhattan Project »
A Theory of A City

by DAVID KISHIK

RECOMMENDED BY:
Emily-Jane Cohen, Executive Editor

This book combines fiction, fact, and argument in a truly unique way. David Kishik has come up with the philosophical equivalent of fan fiction, though what’s admired here is not just another author—Walter Benjamin—but the city of New York, to which the book is a paean. If you ♥ New York, its streets and its arts scene, and if you have an intellectual’s sense of humor, The Manhattan Project is a delightful and entertaining example of what can come from thinking outside the monograph.

ALSO SEE: Reviews of The Manhattan Project in the Los Angeles Review of Books and the Brooklyn Rail; an op-ed from the author on philosophy and the city in the New York Times; and this tweet from @NeinQuarterly.