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The article discusses McKenzie Wark's book, "Raving," which explores the significance of dance and rave culture for queer and trans individuals. Wark's narrative highlights the enduring nature of ephemeral spaces and the transformative power of dance. The book emphasizes the importance of raves as a respite from normative and violent societal norms, offering a chance to contest boundaries and be in the body differently. While not a dance analysis or history, "Raving" expertly portrays the body as a complex vehicle for ethical relations and becoming. The article praises the book's self-awareness and its ability to serve as a model for a critical and philosophical study of performance communities. [Extracted from the article]

Against this type of science, Liboiron offers a model that exemplifies what engaged anticolonial feminist research practice should look like. Thus, Liboiron argues, we need to challenge the assumptions of pollution science and arguably challenge our own scholarly relations and obligations, and simply "do better science". [Extracted from the article]

The formula is a complex and dynamic mathematical calculation used by regulators to translate and action the legal-humanitarian commitments of their country, given that Costa Rica prohibits the mercantilization of water through water utility services. Ballestero attends to the role of technocratic devices - the list, the formula, the index, and the pact - and argues that devices participate in intimate ways in imagining the future of water and enacting it. I A Future History of Water i examines how water and its future are made in technocratic spaces and bureaucratic work following the WHO declaration of water as a human right. [Extracted from the article]

Empire's Mistress i tells us little about what was going on in Hollywood when Cooper gets there in the 1940s and thus the book hardly engages with film scholarship. Cooper's story would have benefitted from a wider examination of the Filipino acting community in Hollywood (and the wider Asian actor community, as Cooper often played other Asian ethnicities). This book takes up the Herculean task of piecing together the story of Isabel Rosario Cooper, a forgotten Filipina actress who started her career on the vaudeville stage in Manila and made a few films before making her way to America to try her luck under the bright lights of Hollywood. [Extracted from the article]

It argues that during the Great Leap Forward era, China was ambitious to become self-sufficient in drug making and export drugs to the world for surpassing Britain. Chapter one focuses on the period from 1950 to 1957 and examines how the PRC transformed Chinese pharmaceutical production by abandoning Chinese medicine and retaining Chinese drugs and merging the drug-making sector into a state-controlled central planning system as part of the state-building project. This chapter argues that, though the separating medicine from Chinese drugs can be traced back to the Republican era, the PRC consolidated traditional medicine making business into the state-controlled factory system in the name of "scientizing Chinese medicine" through introducing science-based innovation for producing these drugs and training a new generation of pharmacists and technicians. [Extracted from the article]

Political change will emerge from what they call "dual power", a politics that involves the contestation of state-capital arrangements of powers along with political actions outside and beyond the state. This is a geographically sensitive, politically committed and challenging work of political theory that seeks to understand the politics of operations, or in other words, what happens when capital as a political actor endowed with social power "hits the ground". The politics of operations: excavating contemporary capitalism: Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson (2019) Durham: Duke University Press, 304pp, $27.95/£20.99 Paper, ISBN: 978-1-4780-0283-3 / Cloth ISBN: 978-1-4780-0175-1. [Extracted from the article]

Assertions of "national biosovereignty" (9) intersect with global health norms of open-access research and transparent surveillance, creating a contested domain of "global health diplomacy" (126). Conversely, Fearnley shows how the complex interplay between science, geopolitics, socioeconomics and culture have produced certain narratives of virulent zones in certain places. Virulent zones: animal disease and global health at China's Pandemic epicenter: by Fearnley, L, Durham, Duke University Press, 2020, 296 pp. [Extracted from the article]

For the final essay in this section, by Mark Mulroney breaks from the formal academic essay to share an "autobiography of abjection" (p. 24). Abjection incorporated: Mediating the politics of pleasure and violenceAbjection Incorporated: Mediating the Politics of Pleasure and Violence: MAGGIE HENNEFELD and NICHOLAS SAMMOND (eds.), Editors Maggie Hennefeld and Nicholas Sammond set out to draw 'a straight line from Gamergate to the alt-right presidency of Donald Trump' (p. 16). [Extracted from the article]

The relationship between the motion picture industry and the city of Paris has a long and fascinating dynamic that is as old as cinema itself. Despite its foundational role in film history and position as a cultural model for aspiring filmmakers and movie enthusiasts alike, "In film studies, Paris has gone largely unexamined" (p. 5). Eric Smoodin's I Paris in the Dark i takes on the daunting task of examining 'the varied audiences of Paris, the movies they watched, and their neighbourhood cinemas also highlights significant changes in the practices of film studies' (p. 4). [Extracted from the article]

There is no better closing line than Levine's own: this work demonstrates that when it comes to soap opera ' I her i stories are I our i own stories' (p. 298). Soaps are what made broadcast television a huge success in the 1980s, indeed, 'daytime dramas were the engine that powered the classic network era' (p. 86). According to Levine, soaps are a "site of the production of gender knowledge" (p. 6), and indeed we see the historical analysis of gender shine as Levine traces how significant moments in women's and gender history influenced soap storylines. [Extracted from the article]

FEELING LIKE A STATE: Desire, Denial, and the Recasting of Authority: By Davina Cooper. Cooper is also aware of the fact that her state conception "may prove less useful, diffusing the extent of coercive state power and blunting some of the ways governmental authority is exercised unequally. Furthermore, as Cooper argues, states not only consist of dissenting and fleeting actors, beliefs, and space; there are also differently scaled state and state-like formations that coexist and overlap. [Extracted from the article]

By foregrounding this labor, Appel illustrates the operation of global capitalism not as a set of intrinsic, systematic logics, but as an ongoing project of construction made through grounded material and semiotic practices. THE LICIT LIFE OF CAPITALISM: U.S. Oil in Equatorial Guinea: By Hannah Appel. While Appel's subject matter is complex, the book's clear, compelling, and approachable prose make it an excellent addition to graduate-level geography courses focused on political economy, political ecology, infrastructure, or racial capitalism. [Extracted from the article]

Nonetheless, in her investigation, Gregg is not only engaging with the critical analysis of time management practices but also provides a discussion about possible approaches to post-work productivity. Through the investigation of early time management research in workplaces, Gregg provides an important historical background to understand productivity optimisation in modern workplaces. Gregg continues her discussion about individualised approaches to productivity in the following section in which she analyses time management techniques present in self-help books and productivity software applications. [Extracted from the article]

First, this case study of the Anindilyakwa-speaking people of Groote Eylant takes up the critique of narratives of modernisation, particularly the "evangelical script" of literacy, conversion and civilisation that suggests Indigenous societies emerge out of orality and cast aside traditions when they encounter the power of literacy. Indigenous Textual Cultures: Reading and Writing in the Age of Global Empire: Edited by Tony Ballantyne, Lachy Paterson and Angela Wanhalla. Laura Rademaker's chapter, 'Going off Script: Aboriginal Rejection and Repurposing of English Literacies', acknowledges and draws on a tradition of Australian research that documents the long Aboriginal tradition of using writing to demand rights. [Extracted from the article]

It is a form of ethnographic play in the image archive, and theory-making from and grounded in West Africa, two exciting endeavors that Bajorek urges scholars of African photography to participate in, and rightly so. Unfixed: Photography and Decolonial Imagination in West Africa. Photography and Decolonial Imagination: Bajorek, Jennifer. [Extracted from the article]

Andrea Ballestero. 2019. A Future History of Water. Durham and London: Duke University Press. ISBN: 9781478004516 (ebook); ISBN: 9781478003595 (hardcover: alk. paper). Hardback £79.99; Paperback £19.99. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Complaining can feel like a shameful secret, and keeping it behind closed doors is, Ahmed shows, a deliberate strategy used by universities to prevent a record of resistance being made by feminist complainers (7). i records the affective and atmospheric shifts that complainers in universities have been subjected to; Ahmed has mapped connections between otherwise atomised experiences. i is, as Ahmed hopes, "a reminder: we are not alone" (277) and the creative, leaky, overflowing, hopeful, hopeless complaint activism will continue to haunt universities, a "slow inheritance" (310) that surely will, eventually, be realised. In going behind the closed doors of complaint, Ahmed brings to light the processes and experiences that complainers in universities share, showing how institutional power crystallizes not only at the institutional scale, but the interpersonal. [Extracted from the article]

Millar, K.M. 2018: Reclaiming the Discarded: Life and Labour on Rio's Garbage Dump. Durham and London: Duke University Press. xii + 236 pp. £18.99 paper. ISBN: 9780822370505 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite anticipating workers' apathy towards pigs, Blanchette instead finds an extreme emotional investment by workers to save every piglet. Through an anthropological and ethnographic study of vertically integrated pork production[1], Blanchette offers a detailed analysis of how top-down ideologies of industrialization impact workers' bodies and lives. In I Porkopolis: American Animality, Standardized Life, and the Factory Farm i , Alex Blanchette articulates the fallible logics of capitalism through the intensification of US pork production by examining "how the capitalist imperatives for growth take hold of industrial pigs" (p. 214) and, in turn, workers. [Extracted from the article]

Livingston, J. 2019: Self-devouring Growth: A Planetary Parable as Told from Southern Africa. Durham, NC: Duke University Press,. 160 pp. $23.95. ISBN: 978-1-4780-0639-8 Paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

"The Government of Beans", he writes, 'refers to regulatory attempts to limit soy's expansion, whereas the Soy State refers to the way the soy industry used the state to help it expand' (p. 11). Kregg Hetherington's previous book on Paraguay, I Guerilla Auditors i ([4]), and the book under review here straddle a historic moment in Paraguayan politics. [Extracted from the article]

7 Daniel Fischlin and Eric Porter, eds., I Playing for Keeps: Improvisation in the Aftermath i (Durham & London: Duke University Press, 2020), 10. 8 Ibid., 87. 9 Ibid., 3-4. 10 Ibid., 39. 11 Ibid., 58. 12 Ibid., 14. I Playing for Keeps i presents "improvisation" not only as a term with multiple definitions and interpretive uses, but also how "improvisation" is implemented in social and cultural practices in music and problem-solving in localities around the world. [Extracted from the article]

Peripheral nerve: health and medicine in Cold War Latin America: Edited by Anne-Emanuelle Birn and Raúl Necochea Lópes, (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020), 376 pp Indeed, Hochman and Paiva deal with not one but two authoritarian dictatorships in twentieth-century Brazil, placing the Cold War-era military regime in its broader domestic context. It may strike some as odd that only one of the book's nine chapters deals directly with Brazil given that it is Latin America's largest country and a focal point of US concern during the Cold War, particularly after the success of the Cuban Revolution. [Extracted from the article]

In I Beneath the Surface i , Lynn Thomas illuminates skin lighteners as geopolitical commodities that intertwine with race, class, and gender to convey how notions of whiteness are valued and upheld. During the early years of apartheid, photo magazines drew further attention to the skin as skin lightening advertisements promoted its malleability to achieve the "social fantasy" of aesthetics. However, Thomas acknowledges that few actually used the products for official reclassification under apartheid and instead sought beautiful complexions and the advantages that came with lighter complexions. [Extracted from the article]

In the closing pages of Evelyn Fox Keller's I Making Sense of Life i ([3]), the renowned feminist science studies scholar argued that the modern sciences lack any foundational unity, but rather are built upon the "disunity of human interests" and marked by our inherently limited cognitive capacities to model and explain the world ([3], 301). While not explicitly addressing the concept of culture for philosophy of science, Mackenzie proposes a general model of culture as "clusters of practices". In summary, the chapters discussed offer exciting visions of cultures of experimentation in the biological sciences and of material cultures of writing in the mathematical sciences. The two goals of this collection, to showcase the problem of culturalism and forge new tools for studying cultures of scientific practice, are admirable goals and on the whole they are well met by the individual studies. [Extracted from the article]

For example, Riofrancos approaches social activism in the form of community-led popular consultations as "non-state democratic practices" (p. 117) challenging the state's monopoly over I democratic i decision-making. I Resource Radicals i examines how, during the leftist governmental wave in early twenty-first century Latin America, the question of what to do with natural resources, in particular hydrocarbons and ore, split the Ecuadorian Left in two. Radical resource nationalists, including president Rafael Correa and most academics, activists, and bureaucrats within his administration, favored either resource nationalization or private exploitation taxed and coordinated by a strong, technocratic and redistributive I post-neoliberal i state. [Extracted from the article]