Drafts in Action: Concepts and Practices of Artistic Intervention

Anna Kipke, Iryna Kovalenko, Laura Rogalski, Simon Teune and Mimmi Woisnitza (Eds.)

Zürich: Diaphanes, 2025

How do practices of artistic intervention engage with conceptual frameworks? This volume addresses the potentials and challenges of different forms of intervention at the intersection of activism and artistic fields and practices. The contributions, written by scholars from art history, sociology, literary and performative studies as well as art practitioners, present case studies that shed light on artistic practices that respond to geopolitical, socio-cultural, and ecological crises, as well as on curatorial projects, the organization of collectives and the role of institutions within the arts and academia.

Open Access

Fragments of Totality: Futurism, Fascism, and the Sculptural Avant-Garde

Ara H. Merjian

Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2024

Illuminating understudied works by prominent artists like Giacomo Balla, Enrico Prampolini, Fortunato Depero, and Bruno Munari alongside the efforts of many lesser-known figures, this first major study of Futurist sculpture opens onto wider questions: from labor and leftist Futurism, to the politics of aesthetic autonomy, to the intersections between race, imperialism, and materials. The medium—and the idea—of sculpture sets into relief the demands of any project of modern cultural totality. 

One-Dimensional Queer

Roderick A. Ferguson

Cambridge: Polity, 2019

The story of gay rights has long been told as one of single-minded focus on the fight for sexual freedom. Yet its origins are much more complicated than this single-issue interpretation would have us believe, and to ignore gay liberation's multidimensional beginnings is to drastically underestimate its radical potential for social change.

Ferguson shows how queer liberation emerged out of various insurgent struggles crossing the politics of race, gender, class, and sexuality, and deeply connected to issues of colonization, incarceration, and capitalism. This forceful book joins the call to reimagine and reconnect the fight for social justice in all its varied forms.

Words Made Flesh: Sylvia Wynter and Religion

Justine M. Bakker & David Kline (Eds.)

New York: Fordham University Press, 2025

Sylvia Wynter's writings have received enthusiastic attention by scholars in Black studies, Caribbean theory, critical race theory, literature, and philosophy. But until recently little scholarly writing exists that directly engages the topic of religion in her corpus. Words Made Flesh seeks to fill this gap by focusing exclusively on religion, religions, and religiosity in her work. Bringing together scholars that provide a wide variety of theoretical perspectives on religion, political theology, social theory, and science studies, this book offers an in-depth engagement with one of the most innovative and important thinkers of the last forty years.

Powers of Ten: A Book About the Relative Size of Things in the Universe and the Effect of Adding Another Zero

Philip and Phylis Morrison and The Office of Charles and Ray Eames

New York: Scientific American Library, 1982

Released in 1982, the book Powers of Ten was an accompanying publication of the 1977 Charles and Ray Eames film series of the same name. Written and designed physicist Philip Morrison, alongside art and science educator Phylis Morrison, the collaborative book transfers the subject matter, look and feel of the original films onto the printed page.

Pathways to Utopia: Time and Transformation in the Landless Workers Movement of Brazil

Alex Ungprateeb Flynn

Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2025

Pathways to Utopia explores how Brazil's Landless Workers Movement (Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra, or MST), against all odds, has endured for forty years as one of the world's largest social movements—while transforming the way we understand the temporality of activism. Taking his cue from MST members and their generational struggle for land and justice, anthropologist Alex Ungprateeb Flynn reveals how the movement's longevity stems not only from its strong organization and collective vision but also from the productive tensions between established utopian ideals and emerging counter-utopian practices.

Dismantling the Master's Clock: On Race, Space and Time

Rasheedah Phillips

Chico: AK Press, 2025

Why do some processes—like aging, birth, and car crashes—occur in only one direction in time, when by the fundamental symmetry of the universe, we should experience time both forward and backward? Our dominant perception of time owes more to Western history and social order than to a fact of nature, argues Rasheedah Phillips, delving into Black and Afrodiasporic conceptions of time. Phillips unfolds the history of time and its legacy of racial oppression. Yet Black communities have long subverted space-time through such tools of resistance as Juneteenth, tenant organizing, ritual, and time travel. What could Black liberation look like if the past were as changeable as the future?

Deserts Are Not Empty

Samia Henni (Ed.)

New York: Columbia Books on Architecture and the City, 2022

Colonial and imperial powers have often portrayed arid lands as “empty” spaces ready to be occupied, exploited, extracted, and polluted. Despite the undeniable presence of human and nonhuman lives and forces in desert territories, the “regime of emptiness” has inhabited, and is still inhabiting, many imaginaries. Deserts Are Not Empty challenges this colonial tendency, questions its roots and ramifications, and remaps the representations, theories, histories, and stories of arid lands—which comprise approximately one-third of the Earth’s land surface. The volume brings together poems in original languages, conversations with collectives, and essays.

Aeropolis: Queering Air in Toxicpolluted Worlds

Nerea Calvillo

New York: Columbia Books on Architecture and the City, 2023

How do we get to know air? Aeropolis offers a speculative and interdisciplinary framework to reorient common understandings of air and air pollution as matter “out there.” It contests regimes of managing air which operate toward upholding dominant modes of world-making that are dependent on forms of exclusion. Instead, it  proposes that air is thought of as a city, to center its social, cultural, political, ecological entanglements. Drawing upon feminist technoscience and queer ecological frameworks, Aeropolis moves away from solutions toward a methodology of “designing-thinking-making” redirecting and connecting our understandings of air—as designers, as citizens—with ongoing struggles for just futures.

Venice, an Archipelago of Art and Ecologies

Cristina Baldacci, Christina Hainzl and Adrian Praschl-Bichler (Eds.)

Bielefeld: transcript, 2025

The archipelago of Venice is often at the centre of socio-ecological discussions due to its uniqueness and ambiguity. It is a world cultural heritage site and, at the same time, a fragile ecosystem, strongly threatened by the climate crisis and overtourism.

This volume brings together scholars, artists, museum professionals and curators to show how Venice is a special observatory for addressing the challenges of the future and how the arts can contribute to an ecological transition and cultural regeneration.

Open Access

Abstraction in Science and Art: Philosophical Perspectives

Julia Sánchez-Dorado & Chiara Ambrosio (Eds.)

New York: Routledge, 2025

This volume explores the roles and uses of abstraction in scientific and artistic practice. Conceived as an interdisciplinary dialogue between experts across histories and philosophies of art and science, this collection of essays draws on the shared premise that abstraction is a rich and generative process, not reducible to the mere omission of details in a representation. Adopting a process-oriented perspective, the chapters in this volume explore the epistemic potential of a diversity of practices of abstracting.

Open Access