(Part 2) Top products from r/CriticalTheory

I don't known what your experience was like in NYC, but each of the different startup regions do have their own flavor. Austin isn't like NYC, which isn't like Seattle or San Francisco. I wonder how many people in NYC that you knew went to Burning Man. In the Bay, it is fairly common. Flashy shows of wealth aren't really a thing in SF like they are in NYC either. Pissing matches between the two scenes are actually fairly common. See this and this.

This is something I drafted a while back, which was edited and put into some piece or another, but basically highlights my point:
>
> From its earliest precursors, the Internet has had its evangelists. And the Silicon Valley offered a unique crucible. Deliberate and unintentional interactions among military researchers, academics, and corporate scientists helped to form the technical features of the medium.

> Meanwhile, the region was the center of the countercultural movement in the 1960s, the failings of which, wrapped into a technological optimism for the power of the networked computer. Along side its topological and programmatic development, discussions of its social, cultural, political and economic potential formed the ethical undergirding. Internet policy, especially the network neutrality debate, is made in the shadows of ideals set in this early era. Prime among those ideals is a profound faith in the technology’s emancipatory potential to boost democratic participation, trigger a renaissance of moribund communities, and strengthen associational life.

Maybe this is too much for your project, but I would look at doing a rhetoric construction of the concept of Silicon Valley. I know there is enough online to do this well. And perhaps this is just my distaste from some of the work I had to grade in grad school, but I always found this work far more intriguing.

This also reminds me. You might be looking in the wrong place for this. I would suggest going into the discipline of rhetoric/communication. Check out this, this, this this, and this. You should also check out Evgeny Morozov.

Indeed, Habermas asks why the European left-wing parties have not more aggressively critiqued the utterly inadequate individual nation-state efforts to reduce globalization's economic adversity on the citizens. But to prefer the existing political order I think misses the mark: The Lure of Technocracy (2015) is dedicated to enumerating the plethora of ways in which the EU democratic deficit of its institutions only compounds the impotence of the nation-states.

With regard to the radical left, The Inclusion of the Other (1996) ties in here:

> Radical feminism rightly insists that the appropriate interpretation of needs and criteria be a matter of public debate in the political public sphere. It is here that citizens must clarify the aspects that determine which differences between the experiences and living situations of (specific groups of) men and women are relevant for an equal opportunity to exercise individual liberties.

> The individual rights that are meant to guarantee to women the autonomy to pursue their lives in the private sphere cannot even be adequately formulated unless the affected persons themselves first articulate and justify in public debate those aspects that are relevant to equal or unequal treatment in typical cases. The private autonomy of equally entitled citizens can be secured only insofar as citizens actively exercise their civic autonomy.

The right-wing demagogues have stolen the Left's themes, winning over many of the “oppressed and disadvantaged for the false path of national isolation” by appealing to simplistic references drilled into the citizens by the nation-state: the ethno-national constitutional state par excellence, to be preserved only by the return of competencies to the national level and the protection of a majority culture dominating political discourse (more on this in The Inclusion of the Other).

It is only through substantial use of the discourse ethics paradigm and the wider implications of deliberative democracy that “the left-wing pro-globalisation agenda” can once again be “distinguished from the neoliberal agenda of political abdication to the blackmailing power of the banks and of the unregulated markets:”

> Genuine participation of citizens in the processes of political will-formation, that is, substantive [deliberative] democracy, would bring to consciousness the contradiction between administratively socialized production and the continued private appropriation and use of surplus value …

> The arrangement of formal democratic institutions and procedures permits administrative decisions to be made largely independently of specific motives of the citizens … while the citizenry, in the midst of an objectively political society, enjoy the status of passive citizens with only the right to withhold acclamation. ( Legitimation Crisis, 1973 )

I wish I had more info for you. Hopefully someone else reading this can chime in. I can only recommend the [translation I read.] (https://www.amazon.com/Being-Harper-Perennial-Modern-Thought/dp/0061575593/ref=asap_bc?ie=UTF8), Macquarrie & Robinson. This is a more recent translation and I don't speak German. The classic version was the [Stambaugh] (https://www.amazon.com/Being-Time-Translation-Contemporary-Continental/dp/1438432763).

Those are the two main ones as far as I know. Once again, I'm sure there are people far better qualified to speak to this than me reading.

It might not be precisely what you're looking for, but if you're using academic investigations of cultures that practice magic, Randal Styers' Making Magic provides an incredibly helpful study of those academic investigations themselves. He's particularly interested in how scholarly work on magic has helped to reinforce cultural assumptions of modernity (by constituting magic as the primitive or improper foil to proper, modern understandings of reason, religion, and desire) and how discourses of magic have helped to destabilize that very project.

Here is the textbook I used for my Critical Theory Class at UCLA. It's called the Norton Anthology of Critical Theory. While this is a good introduction to many theorists, I also suggest you to research supplemental materials on databases - ie. JSTOR - to understand movements/concepts.

There is also a comic book series that's descent depending on what you pick. While I enjoyed Foucault for Beginners, I hated Derrida for Beginners.

Lastly, Jonathan Culler's Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction is an excellent entry point. I actually met Culler when I visited Cornell. He's an awesome guy. Anyways, I think Critical Theory: A Very Short Introduction should also be an excellent resource, although I haven't read it myself.

For a newspaper guide this isn't too bad a starter.

For Aesthetic Theory I gained a great deal of insight from The Redemption of Illusion by Lambert Zuidervaart.

Some that I've really enjoyed:

The Means of Reproduction: Sex, Power, and the Future of the World by Michelle Goldberg

How the Pro-Choice Movement Saved America: Freedom, Politics and the War on Sex by Cristina Page

Life's Work: A Moral Argument for Choice by Dr. Willie Parker

Lovejoy: A Year in the Life of an Abortion Clinic by Peter Korn

This Common Secret: My Journey as an Abortion Doctor by Susan Wicklund

Willing and Unable: Doctors' Constraints in Abortion Care by Lori R. Freedman

Who Decides: The Abortion Rights of Teens by J. Shoshanna Ehrlich

The Story of Jane: The Legendary Underground Feminist Abortion Service by Laura Kaplan

The Abortionist by Rickie Solinger

I'm sure there's a lot more I'm forgetting, as well as ones I have yet to read but are on my list, but all of these were ones I found important/fascinating, and easy-to-read (no dense academic texts).

Let's go with Paul Cilliers and Alicia Juarrero.

Look, I'm not trying to lambasted for posting what I think is basically an interesting case study of how constructivist theories of knowledge are getting applied in fields outside of philosophy. I thought other members of the sub might find something cross-disciplinary interesting and so I tried to post it. That's all.

Your tone betray's a sense of certainty about what you think you know, and that can be a trap friend. Imagine the things you could learn if you gave others the opportunity to say something new and to follow them down path's that you assume to be sloppy or lazy.

I just came across something in one of Barthes' late lectures that you may find surprising.

Maybe he had earned the right to be sloppy and lazy by virtue of his corpus of work, whereas grad students like us are forced to cower at the expectations of academia and disciplinary boundaries lest we try and say something different

http://imgur.com/DcIhsLG

Actually, rhetoric of science is a rather burgeoning field. Check out Alan Gross's The Rhetoric of Science and Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.


Also, honorable mentions for Latour's Science in Action and Sontag's Illness as Metaphor,

https://www.amazon.com/Hegel-Short-Introduction-Peter-Singer/dp/019280197X

i read this in less than a day i think. pretty informative considering how concise it is.

The one that is yet to be written.

As mentioned, the Norton is good, but focussed on literary theory.

You can also try this one, which is one of my favourites: https://www.amazon.com/Critical-Sociology-Selected-Paul-Connerton/dp/014080966X

https://www.amazon.com/Hundred-Years-Psychotherapy-Worlds-Getting/dp/0062506617

https://www.thesunmagazine.org/issues/487/em-from-em-br-we-ve-had-a-hundred-years-of-psychotherapy-and-the-world-s-getting-worse

Critical Terms for the Study of Buddhism (Buddhism and Modernity Series) - Donald Lopez

Pretty much Donald Lopez's entire career, frankly

The Koan: Texts and Contexts in Zen Buddhism - Steven Heine and Dale S. Wright

Buddhism Betrayed?: Religion, Politics, and Violence in Sri Lanka

The Rhetoric of Immediacy: A Cultural Critique of Chan/Zen Buddhism

The Power of Denial: Buddhism, Purity, and Gender

Orientalism and Religion: Post-Colonial Theory, India and "The Mystic East"

EDIT -
You might also dig

Buddhism: A Marxist Approach

and The Empty Circle: B.R. Ambedkar, Karl Marx, and the return of Buddhism to India