
New Books in Critical Theory
Interviews with Scholars of Critical Theory about their New Books Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory
Show episodes

Jason L. Newton, "Cutover Capitalism: The Industrialization of the Northern Forest" (West Virginia UP, 2024)
What happened to the loggers of America’s past when lumbermen moved west and south in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries? How did these communities continue to create value and meaning in these marginal lands? Cutover Capitalism: The Industrialization of the Northern Forest (West Virginia University Pres

William Max Nelson, "Enlightenment Biopolitics: A History of Race, Eugenics, and the Making of Citizens" (U Chicago Press, 2024)
In Enlightenment Biopolitics (U Chicago Press, 2024), historian William Max Nelson pursues the ambitious task of tracing the context in which biopolitical thought emerged and circulated. He locates that context in the Enlightenment when emancipatory ideals sat alongside the horrors of colonialism, slavery, and race-bas

Alisha Ali et al., "Mad Studies Reader: Interdisciplinary Innovations in Mental Health" (Routledge, 2024)
The last few years have brought increased writings from activists, artists, scholars, and concerned clinicians that cast a critical and constructive eye on psychiatry, mental health care, and the cultural relations of mental difference. With particular focus on accounts of lived experience and readings that cover issue

Anita Say Chan, "Predatory Data: Eugenics in Big Tech and Our Fight for an Independent Future" (U California Press, 2025)
Predatory Data: Eugenics in Big Tech and Our Fight for an Independent Future (University of California Press, 2025) illuminates the throughline between the nineteenth century's anti-immigration and eugenics movements and our sprawling systems of techno-surveillance and algorithmic discrimination. With this book, Anita
Today’s guest is Dr Thomas Sutherland, author of the Bloomsbury title, Speaking Philosophically: Communication at the Limits of Discursive Reason (Bloombury, 2024), lecturer in digital media at the University of Southampton, and researcher into digital culture and the humanities, the history of philosophy and contempor

Matt Mahmoudi, "Migrants in the Digital Periphery: New Urban Frontiers of Control" (U California Press, 2025)
As the fortification of Europe's borders and its hostile immigration terrain has taken shape, so too have the biometric and digital surveillance industries. And when US Immigration Customs Enforcement aggressively reinforced its program of raids, detention, and family separation, it was powered by Silicon Valley corpor