The Dark Side of Speech

A Disenchanted Report on the Decade that Preceded the Invasion of Ukraine

Carlo Penco, University of Genoa, Italy

ISBN: 978-1-64889-854-9
Availability: Forthcoming
636pp. ¦ $91 £73 €85

What is disinformation, and why does it matter? How can we understand and detect different kinds of disinformation? With an analysis of relevant events of the period 2012-2022, the book attempts to answer these questions. The book is organized into four parts. (1) The first part presents the notions of post-truth and fake news using some of the most recent critical studies, analyzing some typical examples and the environment in which some of them originated. (2) The second part introduces the notion of conspiracy theory and describes the emergence of the idea of white supremacy and its ramifications, together with the narratives developed during the COVID restrictions. (3) The third part describes the emergence of the algorithms behind social networks and their role in propaganda, making examples of US and European elections and the Brexit referendum. An analysis of 'Cambridge Analytica' shows the tip of an iceberg of disinformation that is spreading around the world. Some remarks by comedians and philosophers help to give a new view on the concept of freedom of speech, with particular attention to the more and more difficult freedom of the press. (4) The fourth part gives some “emergency tools” for detecting disinformation at an individual level, understanding the most hidden mechanisms of disinformation, and the biases that almost unavoidably enter our minds. These tools come from the results both of traditional theories and the most recent social philosophy of language, not despising references to statistics. This is a fundamental book for having a general survey of this period of political turmoil, consulting a wide list of references and official documents, and having a grasp of the means of intellectual self-defense. “This book is non-standard: it relies on the most sophisticated theories of language and yet it gives everything in simple and colloquial language. Differently from sophisticated analyses of linguistic phenomena, it gives the feeling of participating in a tour around what happened in the last decade, with a disenchanted eye that uses some results of the critical literature, without compelling one to become a theoretician in the field of philosophy or critical analysis. The hidden focus of the book is freedom of speech and freedom of thought, and what they mean today in an era of more sophisticated and widespread disinformation permitted by the algorithms governing social networks. ….”

Living the Independence Dream: Ukraine and Ukrainians in Contemporary Socio-Political Context

Edited by Lada Kolomiyets, Dartmouth College/Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv, Ukraine

May 2024 / ISBN: 978-1-64889-861-7
Availability: In stock
366pp. ¦ $114 £91 €106

For many Ukrainians, 1991 was a crucial point when their long-held dream of independence came true. The image of the future life in independent Ukraine was then almost identical to folklore images of Ukraine as the land of milk and honey. "Living the Independence Dream" takes a multi-dimensional look at the period of regained independence as a time of advancement towards the realization of collective dreams shaping the post-Soviet nation, even through everyday disappointments, anxiety, and uncertainty. The collection features personal accounts of several generations of Ukrainians who found themselves displaced by political upheavals in foreign lands, as well as the voices of recently displaced people who left the Donbas or other regions of Ukraine following the outbreak of the Russian aggression. It revisits the legacy of Soviet dissidents and explores the ideologies of Ukrainian language revival and the ways that memory and language construct Ukrainian identity and generate vital energy amidst war. The collection "Living the Independence Dream" aims to analyze the agency of contemporary Ukrainian people and the role of media, literature, and digital folklore in creating new messages, meanings, and values formed during the Independence decades.

THAWZEN Moments: Autoethnographic piano teaching and learning stories

Jeeyeon Ryu, Yorkville University

April 2024 / ISBN: 978-1-64889-930-0
Availability: In stock
210pp. [Color] ¦ $65 £54 €61

THAWZEN Moments: Autoethnographic Piano Teaching and Learning Stories is a collection of 46 vignettes, digitally edited photographs, poems, and reflective-reflexive narratives about children’s imaginative, creative, and magical lifeworlds of exploring music and piano playing. There are many ways of learning to play the piano, THAWZEN different ways of re/imagining music. There are many stories to share with you, never-ending questions to explore together. The stories included in this book are our happy piano play, our shared musical journeys in re/creating more meaningful and joyful piano teaching and learning experiences.

Topics and approaches to studying intelligence

Edited by Andrew Macpherson, University of New Hampshire and Glenn P. Hastedt, James Madison University

April 2024 / ISBN: 978-1-64889-881-5
Availability: In stock
188pp. ¦ $81 £65 €76

The goal of "Topics and approaches to studying intelligence" is to bring into sharper focus the evolving nature of intelligence studies, which is in the midst of a period of significant expansion that is taking place across a number of dimensions. Working on this foundation of past and contemporary analytic intelligence studies, the chapters in "Topics and approaches to studying intelligence" highlight areas of debate and disagreement, provide insight into new areas of study and broaden the methodological toolset used by researchers. Both qualitative and quantitative approaches investigate analysis, alliances, competitive/private sector intelligence, gendered practices of intelligence agencies, the nature of intelligence studies scholarship, accreditation, intelligence disclosure for diplomacy, and the sharing of nuclear-related intelligence.

Chronicles of Care: A Design History of the COVID-19 Virus

Fernando Galdon, Royal College of Art, UK et al.

April 2024 / ISBN: 978-1-64889-950-8
Availability: In stock
372pp. [Color] ¦ $97 £77 €90

The Covid-19 crisis and the designed interventions that the authors have catalogued in this book prove definitively that design does care. The authors documented this as it evolved every day from the 1st January 2020 to 31st May 2020 inclusive. Then they looked at all of this care and caring from the point of view of design and, by the sheer volume of design interventions they have documented, illustrate that design is good in a crisis. What the Covid-19 pandemic illustrated is that for the first time in modern history, capital was totally irrelevant. Money could not save your life. Only design could. Rapidly designed masks, shelters, hospitals, instructional posters, infographics, dashboards, respirators, sanitisers, virtual and local communities emerged to save us. From January 2020, design became king. The Covid-19 global pandemic presented an ontological reality; design is more than margins or profit. In fact, design became extremely valuable when it stopped concentrating on those things and started to care about peoples’ lives. This brief episode in history is still repositioning the status of design and reconfiguring its signifier from consumption to care. The contents of this book cover the outbreak, lockdown, and the beginning of the reopening in the UK. In between, the book functions as a history of pandemic crisis design interventions. As such it is a “research-in-the-moment project” where we have illustrated our thoughts and insights in tables, charts and diagrams. We have accepted all design interventions as valid and given them the same role and status by presenting each of them in a standard format. No curation. No selection. No position. The task of critical analysis must follow – perhaps by us, certainly by others.