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Open Access
Corporeal Aesth/ethics: The Body in Bracha L. Ettinger's Theory and Art
(punctum books, 2026-02-03) Kisiel, Anna
Can we think of an ethics that originates in corporeality, and not in codified or symbolic systems? In Corporeal Aesth/ethics, the body resurfaces as a central category of Bracha L. Ettinger’s theory and art, as well as an interpretive key that allows us to assume ethical responsibility for an Other who is not abstract, or distant, or total. Ettinger’s matrixial theory, a deeply feminist psychoanalytical system, ventures beyond the models of subjectivity based on separation and lack, and thus it helps us rethink togetherness and our own humanity. Corporeal Aesth/ethics explores how we become subjects not through a series of cuts, but through an encounter with radical openness, modeled upon the intrauterine/pregnancy period. Even though the theorized encounter relies on caring, carrying, and sharing, it is far from pleasant and safe, as we might assume. Indeed, some of the knowledge communicated in this phase of subjectivity-becoming may turn out to be painful, even traumatic. It is this profoundly corporeal encounter, Kisiel contends, that makes it possible to conceive of the body as a site and source of ethics. Envisioned through the lens of the matrixial, a subject (never alone, always in severality) reaches new modes of intimacy and hospitality, occasioned by our universally shared, originary experience of becoming with-in the maternal body. A psychoanalyst, theoretician, and feminist, Ettinger is also an artist. Sharing Ettinger’s conviction that “painting and theory are not different aspects that attest to the same thing, but are rather differentiated levels of working-through,” Kisiel maps the entanglements of the (feminine/motherly) body in both dimensions of Ettinger’s work. In five chapters, this book delineates the project of Ettinger’s corporeal aesth/ethics. It contextualizes the matrixial body, analyzes its humanizing potential, and proposes dialogues of Ettinger’s work with feminism, theology, and Holocaust studies.
Open Access
Neomania: How Our Obsession With Innovation is Failing Science, and How to Restore Trust
(Open Book Publishers, 2026-02-06) Vaesen, Krist
Contemporary science faces a profound poly-crisis: replication failures, weak theories, poor generalizability, and declining public trust. Neomania contends that these symptoms stem not merely from flawed practices or institutional pressures, but from a deeper cultural pathology—our collective obsession with innovation. This valorization of the new for its own sake has reshaped the scientific enterprise, privileging novelty over reliability and fragmentation over coordination. Drawing on metascience as well as the philosophy and sociology of science, Neomania offers a critical analysis of how this ethos has permeated the norms and institutions of modern science. The book traces its historical emergence, diagnoses its systemic consequences, and articulates a reform agenda centered on coordination, shared research programs, and epistemic integrity—an agenda that goes well beyond the principles of Open Science. Neomania advances a constructive vision for rebuilding science as a coherent and truth-oriented system. Combining philosophical depth with institutional analysis, it addresses students, scholars, policymakers, and practitioners concerned with the organization of knowledge production in an era of epistemic crisis. It is both a critique of contemporary scientific culture and a normative proposal for its renewal.
Open Access
al-Dānī's al-Taysīr fī al-qirāʾāt al-sabʿ: A Translation with Linguistic Commentary
(Open Book Publishers, 2026-02-04) van Putten, Marijn
Al-Taysīr fī al-Qirāʾāt al-Sabʿ by the 11th century Andalusian scholar ʾAbū ʿAmr al-Dānī is one of the most influential descriptions of the seven reading traditions of the Qurʾān. It is the work on which the later didactic poem by al-Šāṭibī was based, which still stands as the basis for the teaching of the reading traditions among Muslim specialists. This book makes the highly technical genre of the Qurʾānic reading traditions accessible through a rigorous translation of al-Dānī’s work with extensive elucidating footnotes. Besides a full translation of the text, the book also includes an in-depth introduction, which lays out the history of the reading traditions, details of their transmission, the technical terminology of the Qirāʾāt genre, and summarises the linguistic principles of the reading traditions using modern linguistic terminology and illustrative tables.
Open Access
Africa in Russian Imperial Culture: Race, Empire, and Representation (1850-1917)
(Open Book Publishers, 2026-02-19) Frison, Anita
This volume uncovers how Sub-Saharan Africa was imagined in Russian culture from 1850 to 1917. Drawing on travelogues, ethnographic studies, fiction, and museum collections, Anita Frison reveals how Russia—though lacking formal colonies in Africa—nonetheless engaged deeply with Western colonial discourse. Organized around themes of Strangers, Lands, Bodies, Collectors, and Disguises, the book explores how Russians represented African peoples, landscapes, and artifacts to negotiate questions of race, empire, and national identity. Challenging the notion of Russian ‘exceptionalism’, this book demonstrates that imperial attitudes toward Africa often prefigured Soviet anticolonial rhetoric, whilst simultaneously relying on the colonial paradigm. Richly documented and interdisciplinary, this study offers fresh insights for scholars of history, literature, and postcolonial studies, while remaining accessible to curious general readers.
Open Access
Desire: Subject, Sexuation, and Love
(punctum books, 2026-02-27) Munar, Ana María
Have you ever wondered what makes you wake up in the morning? Why not just lay down, stay, and eventually disappear? What is the wanting, the energy, and the grace of liveliness? Desire is at the core of liveliness, and this book explains why it is so. Desire is much more than a mere appendix to love, sex, or our craving to have the latest fashion item. It is what allows the most personal and unique expression of each of us. Desire: Subject, Sexuation, and Love is a work of gratitude to the Lacanian tradition and feminist philosophy. It creatively uses the story of “The Little Mermaid” by H.C. Andersen, as well as art and popular culture to explain the complex landscape of desire and its relation to love and sexuation. Much of the criticism of psychoanalysis from gender studies and poststructuralism is based on a superficial reading of Jacques Lacan, and Munar corrects this, providing in the first half of the book a rigorous and clear analysis of Lacanian subjectification and sexuation, elucidating their relationship to the nature of desire and love, in order to modify overly simplistic and erroneous interpretations of his thinking on desire. Desire is essayistic and poetic philosophy, drawing upon and playing with psychoanalysis, philosophy, literature, biography, poetry, and art. As the reader enters the second part of the book, the focus on Lacanian theory recedes, opening a space that is more paradoxical and multiple where Munar engages in creative form as an expression of critique, transforming our understandings of desire and love, which always elude us while also always being present.
Open Access
Imagining What We Don't Know: Creative Theory and Critical Bodies
(punctum books, 2026-02-23) Samuels, Lisa
Bringing together perception, ecology, community, lingual value, and quantum life, Imagining What We Don’t Know: Creative Theory and Critical Bodies presents twenty-four essays and theory poems that blend interpretive neologisms — wild dialectics, distributed centrality, membranism, deformance, bioautography, transplace, soft text, and more — with readings of visionary philosophers and the art and writing of Algeria, Australasia, the Caribbean, Oceania, the UK, and the US. Committed to experimental ideation and relational ethics, Imagining What We Don’t Know is for art and theory practitioners, philosophy rebels, creative writers, and anyone who relishes thinking about contemporary art, transnational and transdisciplinary life, and how we imagine with language. Imagining What We Don’t Know presents a biblio-architecture of “blurprints” built with theories of the embodied mind that are elemental, entangled, and electrified by the political. This is creative theory, hovering with alterities of art and interpretation and imagining with critical attention.
Open Access
A Society of Meta-Organizations
(Open Book Publishers, 2026-02-12) Berkowitz, Héloïse
Our contemporary societies are made of meta-organizations — organizations composed of other organizations. These range from international bodies like the International Whaling Commission, to national industry or business associations like the crowdfunding association Finance Participative France, to local associations such as fisheries co-management committees in Catalunya. Meta-organizations have become a defining feature of how actors coordinate, govern and make collective decisions. But what exactly makes them distinct, and why do they matter — both in theory and in practice? This book delves into the importance, characteristics and diversity of meta-organizations. It explores four interrelated perspectives: meta-organizations as a widespread, heterogeneous empirical phenomenon in contemporary society, as a conceptual framework that raises specific methodological challenges, as part of a broader theory of decision-based social orders, and ultimately as arenas where hegemonic and counter-hegemonic dynamics may unfold. By bridging theory and practice, this work offers new insights into how meta-organizations operate, how they can be studied and understood, the problems they raise and what they can achieve under certain conditions — making it essential reading for practitioners, students, scholars, and policymakers alike.
Open Access
Urban Liquefaction: Rethinking the Relationship between Land and Sea
(punctum books, 2026-01-28) Simonetti, Cristián; Lussault, Michel; Ingold, Tim
From classical times until today, cities have been conceived in the western imagination as ideally confined to the fixities of the land, a space defined in opposition to the fluxes of the sea. Whereas solid land afforded a durable platform for the establishment of property and citizenship, the fluid sea allowed markets---isolated within the secure boundaries of cities---to be connected across the globe though navigation. Urban Liquefaction: Rethinking the Relationship between Land and Sea attends to the concurrent tensions between solidity and fluidity, permanence and impermanence, and substance and change that remain at the core of the western intellectual tradition, often dividing what is perceived as social from what is perceived as natural in life. Sea level rise poses unprecedented threats to this oppositional relationship, forcing us to reconsider the tension between solidity and fluidity in the design of the built environment. Nearly ten percent of all major cities are likely to be impacted by sea level rise in the coming decades, compromising the necessary infrastructure on which urban life depends. In reality, urban landscapes have been continually in flux, which becomes dramatically visible to urban dwellers mostly in catastrophic events such as earthquakes, tsunamis, alluvions, sinkholes and, above all, soil liquefaction. Urban Liquefaction gathers contributions from scholars and practitioners working across continents and fields interested in urban life in (and after) the Anthropocene, including anthropology, archaeology, art, architecture, design, human geography, and science studies, to open up an inquiry into these categorical tensions and to speculate on alternative futures for the built environment.
Open Access
Heroines of Greek and Roman Myth: An Intermediate Latin Reader
(Open Book Publishers, 2026-01-05) Teitel Paule, Maxwell
This volume offers students a fresh approach to reading Latin through the lens of women’s stories in classical myth. Too often, the myths encountered in Latin classrooms center on men, while women are pushed to the margins or depicted primarily as victims of violence. This reader deliberately shifts focus, presenting narratives of nine heroines without requiring students to navigate accounts of sexual assault—an important consideration when the challenge of mastering Latin syntax is already demanding. The stories, carefully adapted from ancient sources, progress in grammatical and stylistic difficulty, beginning with accessible prose and gradually building toward the complexity of authentic classical Latin. Drawing on Dickinson College’s Latin Core Vocabulary, the book ensures that learners are practicing the most useful words, while less common terms are glossed in-line to promote fluid reading rather than constant translation. Designed for students completing an introductory Latin sequence or beginning an intermediate course, the volume reinforces core grammar through repeated exposure while introducing more authentic word order and stylistic patterns in later chapters. Both practical and engaging, this book smooths the transition from textbook Latin to unadapted texts, making the voices of classical heroines central to the learning experience.
Open Access
Passivisation in Semitic, Iranian, Armenian, and Beyond
(Open Book Publishers, 2026-01-07) Noorlander, Paul M.; Asadpour, Hiwa
This volume brings together research on passive voice constructions in low-resource languages of Western Asia, a region marked by extraordinary linguistic diversity as well as a long history of cultural suppression and marginalisation. The contributions showcase the passive voice in Semitic, Iranian, Armenian, Greek, and Turkic languages, many of which are endangered, understudied, or confined to diaspora communities and disappearing language islands. Education and cultural expression in these languages remained heavily restricted across parts of Turkey, Syria, Iraq, and Iran, underscoring the urgent need for documentation and revitalisation. The chapters explore the rich typological variation of passive voice constructions, examining their typological traits, synchronic microvariation and diachronic developments. Drawing on Siewierska’s definition, the studies investigate processes of agent demotion and patient promotion, reductions in transitivity, and the fuzzy boundaries between passive and other detransitivisation strategies such as middles, anticausatives, statives and light verbs as well as impersonal subjects and agent omission. They also shed light on the impact of text genre, verbal aspect, and language contact on passivisation. By integrating theoretical, typological, historical, and areal perspectives, the volume discusses the internal stability of detransitivisation strategies, their evolution from earlier source constructions, and their position in voice systems more broadly. It raises fundamental questions about whether cross-linguistic tendencies in passives reflect universal patterns or area-specific historical contingencies. This collection thus provides an essential resource for scholars of all theoretical persuasions that are interested in voice and valency and/or in Western Asia’s linguistic diversity, while foregrounding the pressing need to support communities whose linguistic heritage is at risk.
Open Access
Science in the Salon: Atoms and Animals in Madeleine de Scudéry’s 'Conversations' (1680–92): An Essay and Translation
(Open Book Publishers, 2026-01-30) Taylor, Helena
Madeleine de Scudéry (1607–1701) was a celebrated seventeenth-century novelist and essayist, yet her engagement with natural philosophy and the sciences has been largely overlooked. This volume presents the first English translation of 'The Story of Two Chameleons' (1688) and situates it within Scudéry’s broader scientific and philosophical writing. Beyond this seminal text, the book explores her reflections on atomism, natural history, and epistemology, revealing her critical engagement with cutting-edge theories of her time, including a challenge to the Cartesian ‘animal-machine’ hypothesis. By translating and analyzing key sections from her multi-volume Conversations (1680–1692), including ‘On Uncertainty’, ‘The Story of Prince Ariamène’, which features Democritus, and ‘On Butterflies’, alongside selected manuscript material, this volume demonstrates how Scudéry’s interdisciplinary approach defied rigid intellectual boundaries, activating what Anne-Lise Rey terms ‘epistemic mobility.’ Her work offers a vital perspective on women’s contributions to the history of science and philosophy, and illuminates the ways in which marginalized voices engaged with and shaped knowledge production. With a critical introduction and extensive commentary, this open access edition makes Scudéry’s work widely available to scholars and students in early modern studies, French literature, philosophy, animal studies, and the environmental humanities. It is a timely contribution to ongoing efforts to recover women’s intellectual history and reassess the intersections of literature, science, and philosophy in early modern Europe.
Open Access
The Case of California
(punctum books, 2026-01-20) Rickels, Laurence A.
Focusing on the changing image of the West Coast through such varied social and cultural artifacts as bodybuilding, group therapy, suicide cults, Marilyn Monroe, milk-carton images of missing children, orgies, Mickey Mouse, zombies, teenage slang, shock therapy, and surf music, The Case of California offers a dizzying psycho-history of the twentieth century as crystallized in the symbolic configuration and “case” of California, which case is articulated in relation to German modernism, National Socialism, and Freudian psychoanalysis. As Laurence Rickels writes, “on the personalizable level or label, California is a death cult; on the social, outward, happy-face level, it distributes pleasure via sadomasochism, the adolescent group, or friendship.” Ultimately, The Case of California excavates the places “California” occupies as concept or placeholder within Freudian psychoanalysis and such systems as the Frankfurt School, East Coast psychoanalysis, and deconstruction. To excavate the full range of “California,” one must apply pressure to a series of adjacent (and often equally marginal or missing) concepts, including group and adolescent psychology, female sexuality, the haunting of music and of mass media at large, the charge of child abuse, and a certain convergence of religious and hysterical conversion.
Open Access
More with More: Investing in the Energy Transition: 2025 European Public Investment Outlook
(Open Book Publishers, 2025-12-08) Cerniglia, Floriana; Saraceno, Francesco
This outlook offers a timely and insightful exploration of Europe’s energy transition, a process that lies at the heart of today’s environmental, economic, and political debates. It examines the diverse commitments undertaken by European countries as they navigate the challenges of decarbonization and the shift to sustainable energy systems. By analyzing both the policy frameworks and the concrete instruments adopted to reach ambitious climate and energy goals, the book sheds light on the strategies shaping the continent’s future. A particular emphasis is placed on the role of public investment, highlighting how state action can catalyze innovation, support infrastructure, and bridge gaps where market forces alone may fall short. Through this lens, the volume not only evaluates existing practices but also considers the broader implications for governance, equity, and long-term resilience. Written with clarity and rigor, the outlook will be of interest to policymakers, scholars, and practitioners seeking to understand the dynamics of Europe’s green transition. It invites readers to consider the balance between national priorities and collective European objectives, offering valuable insights into how commitments translate into action—and how public investment can be a decisive lever for change.
Open Access
Solidarity in Contingency: Rorty’s Constructive Project
(Open Book Publishers, 2025-12-02) Huckerby, Elin D.; Janack, Marianne
Richard Rorty (1931–2007), once dubbed ‘the man who killed truth’, is best known for challenging the idea that philosophy provides foundational knowledge. Yet beyond the controversy lies a vital, underexplored side of Rorty’s work: his constructive vision for fostering democratic solidarity in a world shaped by contingency and uncertainty. This volume shifts focus from defending Rorty to applying his insights for today’s fractured, post-truth culture. Centered on Rorty’s "Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity" (1989), the collection explores how his pragmatism helps us reimagine philosophy as a cultural practice—one grounded not in timeless truths, but in shared hopes, vocabularies, and democratic cooperation. The volume brings together seven original essays that revisit Rortyan concepts like liberal ironism, poetic redescription, eirenism, and democratic solidarity, and explore their implications for social justice, feminist theory, public discourse, and the humanities. Rather than lament relativism or retreat into essentialism, these contributions demonstrate how Rorty’s philosophy offers practical, imaginative tools for navigating difference and building inclusive societies. Emphasizing creativity over certainty and solidarity over skepticism, this timely volume reclaims Rorty’s legacy as a philosopher of hope—and a resource for democratic renewal in our era of radical uncertainty.
Open Access
Broken: Illness and Disability in Antônio Francisco Lisboa, Camilo Castelo Branco, Clarice Lispector, Victor Willing, Paula Rego and Ana Palma
(Open Book Publishers, 2025-12-11) Lisboa, Maria Manuel
'Broken: Illness and Disability in Antônio Francisco Lisboa, Camilo Castelo Branco, Clarice Lispector, Victor Willing, Paula Rego and Ana Palma' traces the lives and works of six major artists and writers from Portugal, Brazil, and Britain through the lens of 'being broken'—in body, mind, or both. Spanning from the eighteenth century to the present, the volume explores how sociopolitical and somatic factors such as mental illness, psychological abuse, arthritis, genital mutilation, and multiple sclerosis shaped their creativity, while also reflecting broader national, social, sexual, and political pressures. Engaging both literature and visual art, the book offers an original and provocative perspective that unsettles conventional narratives of health, gender, and identity in Lusophone and transnational contexts. By situating canonical figures alongside emerging voices, 'Broken' bridges generations and disciplines, revealing how art and fiction transform experiences of illness and disability into critical insights on society, history, and power.
Open Access
"FOLLOW THE PERSON": Archival Encounters
(punctum books, 2025-12-22) Alcalay, Ammiel
Poet, novelist, translator, scholar, and critical essayist extraordinaire, Ammiel Alcalay’s intrepid work has always moved across geographic, chronological, political, and linguistic borders. “FOLLOW THE PERSON”: Archival Encounters gathers a dizzying array of texts by Alcalay written over the past fifteen years, all of them having something to do with archival materials. In Alcalay’s case, however, these archives range from more traditional, institutionally-held materials and personal collections to the use of his own experiences and memories as sources for redrawing cultural maps that have too long been divided along sectarian lines of one kind or another. Moving from the Beats and the Black Arts Movement to the Middle East, “FOLLOW THE PERSON” recalibrates our sense of living history while offering new possibilities for encounters that have been relegated to oblivion or never even imagined. Culled from a variety of eclectic sources and contexts, encountering these essays together offers a completely different experience of Alcalay’s essays, one that argues for a methodology based on minutely recorded events and historical contexts, and for necessary human and cultural encounters that provide models for a new, reinvigorated critical vocabulary. As Miriam Nichols writes in her Introduction, “Follow the tenuous threads in this collection of writings and you may end up at the looted National Museum in Baghdad during the American invasion, or in the Hoover Institute at Stanford University where most Iraqi state archives wound up. You may find yourself at Bashcharshiya, the market in Sarajevo during the Bosnian war, or in Palestine, on May 14, 1948. Maybe, if you are keen, you will pick up the thread that leads to 17th-century colonial Massachusetts, or perhaps you will stay in New York, rummaging through garbage cans with Diane di Prima, looking for journals and letters tossed out by a lover.” Whichever path you take, you will find multiple worlds, all rendered by Alcalay with light and compassion.
Open Access
Education 2.0: Chronicles of Technological and Cultural Change in Egypt
(Open Book Publishers, 2025-11-17) Herrera, Linda
Education 2.0 offers a compelling portrait of Egypt’s bold attempt to overhaul its public education system amid sweeping political and technological transformation. Drawing on extensive oral history interviews, this book traces the launch and rollout of the ‘New Education System’ initiated by the Ministry of Education in 2018, designed to modernize curriculum, pedagogy, and assessment in the digital age and change the ‘culture of learning’. The volume moves fluidly from macro-level state planning to the lived experiences of teachers and students, exploring the promises and pitfalls of top-down reform. Conducted partly during the COVID-19 pandemic, the research captures Egypt’s first large-scale experiment with hybrid and distance learning. Interviews with key actors—from policymakers and tech developers to students and educators—reveal competing visions, unintended consequences, and the challenges of culturally transforming education systems in a middle-income country where private tutoring is rife, the sector is chronically under resourced, and politics overshadows policy. This book is essential reading for scholars, practitioners, and policymakers interested in education reform, digital transformation, and the role of the state in shaping learning futures in the Global South. It is also an excellent case study for courses in Middle East studies and comparative and international education.
Open Access
Perceptron
(punctum books, 2025-11-21) Dobson, James E.; Mosteirin, Rena J.
Perceptron is a work of experimental poetry and a critical biographical reading of Frank Rosenblatt (1928–1971) and his 1957 invention, the Perceptron. The Perceptron was the first widely publicized and used machine learning device and the origin of much contemporary neural network technology. Rosenblatt was a psychologist, a computer engineer, a musician, an amateur astronomer, a sailor, and a poet. The Perceptron was born from an interdisciplinary mix of ideas and was so far ahead of its time that it was widely misunderstood by other scientists and the public. This mechanical invention, imagined as an alternative to general purpose digital computers, and its algorithmic implementation as a simulation of the device was deeply rooted in mid-twentieth century neuroscience and psychological theories of behavior. Introduced to the world by one newspaper under the headline “Shades of Frankenstein!” in 1958, following a public demonstration in Maryland sponsored by the US Navy, the Perceptron was a radical new approach to designing computer systems. What made it different was its design as a simplified model of animal vision systems. The Perceptron could perform pattern recognition and matching from a collection of simple visual objects. It was innovative and impressive, but it was also constantly oversold by its financial supporters, the press, and by its inventor. Perceptron traces, contextualizes, and celebrates the ideas that would become embedded in this early thinking machine and that animated the excitement and promise that would eventually turn to frustration and failure during Rosenblatt’s tragically short lifetime.
Open Access
Allocation, Distribution, and Policy: Notes, Problems, and Solutions in Microeconomics
(Open Book Publishers, 2025-11-04) Bowles, Samuel; Chen, Weikai
Microeconomics has been transformed in recent decades by the increasing use of game theory, behavioral economics, evolutionary modeling, network economics, mechanism design and attention to limited competition and asymmetric information. Bowles and Chen provide problem sets and exam questions (with carefully explained solutions) based on the new microeconomics, engaging learners with applications to income distribution, limited competition in goods and labor markets, climate change, and other public policy topics. Background notes explain the underlying concepts, their origin in the thinking of the great economists of the past, applications to macroeconomics, and relevant empirical evidence. This work provides a problem-based and policy oriented approach to teaching microeconomics, development, labor, environment, public economics and topics in business, management and public policy to upper level undergraduates, masters and doctoral students.
Open Access
The Intertwined World of the Oral and Written Transmission of Sacred Traditions in the Middle East
(Open Book Publishers, 2025-11-06) Fedeli, Alba; Khan, Geoffrey; Lundberg, Johan
In the medieval Middle East, the scriptures of Christianity, Judaism and Islam were transmitted in written and oral form. The means of written transmission and the textualisation of the oral reading of these scriptures exhibit many parallels, which reflect cultural contact and convergence across the various religious communities. This volume is the outcome of a project, funded jointly by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft and the Arts and Humanities Research Council, that aimed to bring together strands of research related to various aspects of the transmission of these sacred texts in order to reach a deeper understanding of the intertwined world of the three major religions of the Middle East at their formative periods of development during the early Islamic centuries.