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From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism
In From Counterculture to Cyberculture Fred Turner details the previously untold story of a highly influential group of San Francisco Bay Area entrepreneurs: Stewart Brand and the Whole Earth network. Between 1968 and 1998, via such familiar venues as the National Book Award–winning Whole Earth Catalog, the computer-conferencing system known as WELL, and, ultimately, the launch of the wildly successful Wired magazine, Brand and his colleagues brokered a long-running collaboration between San Francisco flower power and the emerging technological hub of Silicon Valley. Thanks to their vision, counterculturalists and technologists alike joined together to reimagine computers as tools for personal liberation, the building of virtual and decidedly alternative communities, and the exploration of bold new social frontiers. While tracing the extraordinary transformation of how our networked culture came to be, Turner’s fascinating book reminds us that the distance between the Grateful Dead and Google, between Ken Kesey and the computer itself, is not as great as we might think. “[Turner] postulates that Brand was an idealistic (albeit Barnum-esque) leader of a merry band of cybernetic pranksters who framed the concept of computers and the Internet with a seemingly nonintuitive twist: These one-time engines of government and big business had transmogrified into a social force associated with egalitarianism, personal empowerment, and the nurturing cocoon of community.”—Steven Levy, Bookforum“Turner convincingly portrays a cadre of journalists who strove to transform the idea of the computer from a threat during the Cold War into a means of achieving personal freedom in an emerging digital uptopia.”—Paul Duguid, Times Literary Supplement.
Price: $10.00
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The Dictionary of Alternatives: Utopianism and Organization
This dictionary provides ammunition for those who disagree with the early twentieth-first century orthodoxy that 'There is no alternative to free market liberalism and managerialism'. Using hundreds of entries and cross-references, it proves that there are many alternatives to the way that we currently organize ourselves. These alternatives could be expressed as fictional utopias, they could be excavated from the past, or they could be described in terms of the contemporary politics of anti-corporate protest, environmentalism, feminism and localism. Part reference work, part source book, and part polemic, this dictionary provides a rich understanding of the ways in which fiction, history and today's politics provide different ways of thinking about how we can and should organize for the coming century. .
Price: $20.75
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Jewish Identities: Nationalism, Racism, and Utopianism in Twentieth-Century Music (California Studies in 20th-Century Music)
Jewish Identities mounts a formidable challenge to prevailing essentialist assumptions about "Jewish music," which maintain that ethnic groups, nations, or religious communities possess an essence that must manifest itself in art created by members of that group. Klára Móricz scrutinizes concepts of Jewish identity and reorders ideas about twentieth-century "Jewish music" in three case studies: first, Russian Jewish composers of the first two decades of the twentieth century; second, the Swiss American Ernest Bloch; and third, Arnold Schoenberg. Examining these composers in the context of emerging Jewish nationalism, widespread racial theories, and utopian tendencies in modernist art and twentieth-century politics, Móricz describes a trajectory from paradigmatic nationalist techniques, through assumptions about the unintended presence of racial essences, to an abstract notion of Judaism..
Price: $31.95
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Feminist Utopianism & Education
This book looks to feminist utopian thinking to seek alternative conceptualisations of the issue of gender and education We are currently faced with a situation where the issue of gender has become one of competing needs. Debates on gender have swung from a concern for the progress of girls and women to a 'moral panic' about the lack of engagement of boys in education. The formulation of policy that swings from concerns and initiatives to support the educational progress of girls and women to a crisis about the engagement of boys and young men in education is ultimately to the detriment of both genders, to the educational system and to society as a whole. There is an urgent need for us to consider alternative approaches to the issue of gender and education. In utopian writing, education has been constructed as one of the means of bringing about 'the good society' but importantly within feminist utopian writing and thinking what we understand as 'education' is itself being transformed. In feminist utopian thinking, side by side with a critique of formal educational institutions, there is an attempt to think more holistically about the relationship between the educative process and the achievement of girls' and women's self-determination both individually and collectively to bring about a realignment of gender relationships in the sociopolitical order. This book draws from the debates about gender in the visions of alternative sociopolitical orders found in feminist utopian thinking to explore the issue of gender and education. This book will be of special relevance to those interested in feminism, gender studies, educational futures and utopian thinking..
Price: $48.99
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Higher Ground: From Utopianism to Realism in American Feminist Thought and Theory (Women in Culture and Society Series)
Many feminists love a utopia—the idea of restarting humanity from scratch or transforming human nature in order to achieve a prescribed future based on feminist visions. Some scholars argue that feminist utopian fiction can be used as a template for creating such a future. However, Sally L. Kitch argues that associating feminist thought with utopianism is a mistake. Drawing on the history of utopian thought, as well as on her own research on utopian communities, Kitch defines utopian thinking, explores the pitfalls of pursuing social change based on utopian ideas, and argues for a "higher ground" —a contrasting approach she calls realism. Replacing utopianism with realism helps to eliminate self-defeating notions in feminist theory, such as false generalization, idealization, and unnecessary dichotomies. Realistic thought, however, allows feminist theory to respond to changing circumstances, acknowledge sameness as well as difference, value the past and the present, and respect ideological give-and-take. An important critique of feminist thought, Kitch concludes with a clear, exciting vision for a feminist future without utopia. .
Price: $11.49
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Visions of the City: Utopianism, Power and Politics in Twentieth Century Urbanism
Visions of the City is a dramatic history of utopian urbanism in the twentieth century. It explores radical demands for new spaces and ways of living, and considers their effects on planning, architecture and struggles to shape urban landscapes. The author critically examines influential utopian approaches to urbanism in western Europe associated with such figures as Ebenezer Howard and Le Corbusier, uncovering the political interests, desires and anxieties that lay behind their ideal cities. He also investigates avant-garde perspectives from the time that challenged these conceptions of cities, especially from within surrealism. At the heart of this richly illustrated book is an encounter with the explosive ideas of the situationists. Tracing the subversive practices of this avant-garde group and its associates from their explorations of Paris during the 1950s to their alternative visions based on nomadic life and play, David Pinder convincingly explains the significance of their revolutionary attempts to transform urban spaces and everyday life. He addresses in particular Constant's New Babylon, finding within his proposals a still powerful provocation to imagine cities otherwise. The book not only recovers vital moments from past hopes and dreams of modern urbanism. It also contests current claims about the 'end of utopia', arguing that reconsidering earlier projects can play a critical role in developing utopian perspectives today. Through the study of utopian visions, it aims to rekindle elements of utopianism itself. "A superb critical exploration of the underside of utopian thought over the last hundred years and its continuing relevance in the here and now for thinking about possible urban worlds. The treatment of the Situationists and their milieu is a revelation." David Harvey, Distinguished Professor of Anthropology, City University of New York Graduate School.
Price: $37.96
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