Vol. 24, No. 1-2 [2016]
This issue addresses diverse questions of materialism and materiality. Articles dialogue with emergent accounts of materiality and materialism, from new materialist, feminist materialist, speculative realist, and object-oriented accounts of materiality to rethinking of concepts of materiality and materialism in Marxist theory, ecotheory, biopolitical theory, affect theory, animal studies, and posthumanisms. They ask can materialism serve as a new organizing principle for the humanities? What kinds of questions does a focus on materialism and materiality open up? What does it close down? How can the different forms of materialist speculation be brought into productive dialogue with each other?

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Vol. 23, No. 1-2 [2015]
This issues engages posthumanism in ways that avoid flattening “the human” into a monolithic or homogenous problematic. Its takes up posthumanism in relation to the crisis of the humanities and the ongoing crises faced by marginalized “humans” around the globe. It asks how might posthumanist thought by symptomatic of the crisis of the humanities and higher education more broadly? How has posthumanist inquiry ignored the lived heterogeneities of humanness distributed across raced, classed, gendered, and differently abled bodies? How can posthumanism’s critical political project benefit from being brought into intimate connection with critical race, queer, feminist, anti-colonial, and disability theories?

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Vol. 22, Nos. 1-2 [2014]
This issue theoretically engages the referential and figural use of austerity. What is austerity? What are the social, political, economic and intellectual dimensions of austerity? Who is the paradigmatic subject of austerity? Is its meaning transhistorical and transcultural? Or is it imbued in ideology and thus irremediably discursive and historically contingent? Whose austerity is acknowledged and whose is ignored? Is austerity an ontological concern? Does austerity have an aesthetics? Can an inquiry into austerity ever be disentangled from neoliberalism? How have austerity measures affected the contemporary academic culture?

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Vol. 21, No. 2 [2013]
Climate change asks of critical and cultural theorists nothing more or less than a re-evaluation of ourselves, even while it challenges us to put to use the critical tools we have at hand. For one thing, it calls for us to ask how critical concepts like power, ideology, mediation, capital, colonialism, gender, oppression, society, and construction help us to understand the challenges presented by climate change. For another, it asks whether the current crisis wrought by anthropogenic climate change defies or affirms the assumptions that underpin cultural critical theory—and to what extent. Can we respond—and, if so, how—through now established critical modes, such as those signaled by deconstruction, post-structuralism, genre theory, psychoanalysis, Marxism, and science studies, or those practiced under the rubrics of, among others, Agamben, Badiou, Butler, Deleuze, Derrida, Foucault, Habermas, Latour, and Žižek? Or does climate change demand a new kind of theory?

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Vol. 20, Nos. 1- 2 [2012]
This issue engages the diverse and potentially paradoxical relations of violence, politics, and ethics. What form does violence take in philosophy and the arts? Does globalization enable a different understanding of violence, that is, an alternative way of imagining the subject and object of violence? How does violence negotiate the discourses of resistance, commodification or subjectification? With regard to ineffable effects of dominance and aggression, along with various representations and repetitions of arbitrary violence, can and how might violence be productively, even progressively, reinscribed and rethought? Does violence have a history?

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Vol. 19, No. 1 [2011]
This issue addresses the referential and figural use of hunger. What is hunger? Is it a sign of our humanity or animality? Who is the paradigmatic subject of hunger? Is its meaning transhistorical and transcultural? Or is it imbued in ideology and thus irremediably discursive and historically contingent? Whose hunger is acknowledged and whose is ignored? Is hunger an ontological or ontic concern? Is it a metaphysical desire (the hunger for recognition) or a biological need (the hunger for food)? Is hunger a global problem to be eradicated, or a perpetual reminder of our embodiment and exposure to others? Can an inquiry into hunger ever be disentangled from biopolitics? Can we speak of both an aesthetics of hunger and a hunger for aesthetics? Is intellectual hunger a desire for disciplinarity, a taste for theory?

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Vol. 18, Nos. 1-2 [2010]
This issue address the role of the emotions in contemporary critical theory and practice. Are there particular emotions critics or theorists feel? Are criticism and sympathy mutually exclusive? What is the place of emotions in posthumanism? Are we returning to an aesthetics of feelings? Is this a new aesthetics? To what extent are feelings and sentiments back in the focus of critical theory? What does the exploration of emotional representation look like after the global turn in theory? What does it mean to feel for the other in the age of transnationalism? What is the place of emotion after the postmodern deconstruction of the sentimental subject?

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