Debugging the Anthropocene's insistence on apocalyptic tropes Where the Anthropocene has become linked to an apocalyptic narrative, and where this narrative carries a widespread escapist belief that salvation will come from a supernatural elsewhere, Joanna Zylinska has a different take. The End of Man rethinks the prophecy of the end of humans, interrogating the rise in populism around the world and offering an ethical vision of a "feminist counterapocalypse," which challenges many of the masculinist and technicist solutions to our planetary crises. The book is accompanied by a short photo-film, Exit Man, which ultimately asks: If unbridled progress is no longer an option, what kinds of coexistences and collaborations do we create in its aftermath? Forerunners: Ideas First is a thought-in-process series of breakthrough digital publications. Written between fresh ideas and finished books, Forerunners draws on scholarly work initiated in notable blogs, social media, conference plenaries, journal articles, and the synergy of academic exchange. This is gray literature publishing: where intense thinking, change, and speculation take place in scholarship.

The Polish writer Stanislaw Lem is best known to English-speaking readers as the author of the 1961 science fiction novel "Solaris," adapted into a meditative film by Andrei Tarkovsky in 1972 and remade in 2002 by Steven Soderbergh. Throughout his writings, comprising dozens of science fiction novels and short stories, Lem offered deeply philosophical and bitingly satirical reflections on the limitations of both science and humanity.

In "Summa Technologiae"--his major work of nonfiction, first published in 1964 and now available in English for the first time--Lem produced an engaging and caustically logical philosophical treatise about human and nonhuman life in its past, present, and future forms. After five decades "Summa Technologiae" has lost none of its intellectual or critical significance. Indeed, many of Lem's conjectures about future technologies have now come true: from artificial intelligence, bionics, and nanotechnology to the dangers of information overload, the concept underlying Internet search engines, and the idea of virtual reality. More important for its continued relevance, however, is Lem's rigorous investigation into the parallel development of biological and technical evolution and his conclusion that technology will outlive humanity.

Preceding Richard Dawkins's understanding of evolution as a blind watchmaker by more than two decades, Lem posits evolution as opportunistic, shortsighted, extravagant, and illogical. Strikingly original and still timely, "Summa Technologiae" resonates with a wide range of contemporary debates about information and new media, the life sciences, and the emerging relationship between technology and humanity.

Imaginary Neighbors offers a unique and significant contribution to the contemporary debate concerning Holocaust memory by exploring the most important current political topic in Poland: Jewish-Polish relations during and after World War II. Drawing on the controversy and attention generated by Jan Gross's landmark book Neighbors, whose description of the brutal Jedwabne massacre reignited the debate over Polish-Jewish relations during the war, this timely volume presents a rich and nuanced examination of the manner in which past and present relations between Poles and Jews are understood in Poland and in the Polish and Jewish diasporas. Rather than revisiting historical details of Jedwabne, this innovative collection uses an interdisciplinary approach to understand the reverberations of the events-and the scholarship that has evolved around them-within the context of the Polish national community. Combining scholarly essays with literary and journalistic accounts, Imaginary Neighbors demonstrates that the Holocaust memory in Poland, together with the memory of Polish Jews and Jewish culture, continues to be engaged in conflict. What emerges is a passionate conversation among cultural critics, philosophers, literary theorists, historians, theologians, and writers on the vexing issues of responsibility, forgiveness, reconciliation, and national and religious identity. Dorota Glowacka is an associate professor in Contemporary Studies at the University of King's College, in Halifax, Nova Scotia. She is a coeditor of Between Ethics and Aesthetics: Crossing the Boundaries. Joanna Zylinska is a senior lecturer in the Department of Media and Communications at Goldsmiths College at the University of London. She is the author of The Ethics of Cultural Studies and On Spiders, Cyborgs, and Being Scared: The Feminine and the Sublime.

Ethical questions feature prominently on today's cultural and political agendas. The Ethics of Cultural Studies presents an ethical manifesto for Cultural Studies, an exploration of its current ethical and political concerns, and of its future challenges. The book focuses on a number of key issues: National, racial and sexual identity; Representation; Violence and the media; The relationship between body and technology; The science-culture 'wars'; The text engages with the writings of the important theorists of ethics and culture: Giorgio Agamben; Judith Butler; Jacques Derrida; Stuart Hall; Donna Haraway; N. Katherine Hayles; Ernesto Laclau; Emmanuel Levinas; Jean-Francois Lyotard; Samuel Weber; The book is concerned with ethics in the material world, and draws on examples as diverse as cloning and genetics, asylum and immigration, experiments in plastic surgery and in electronic and digital art, memories of the Holocaust, September 11th and media representations of violence and crime. The Ethics of Cultural Studies is a groundbreaking intervention that sets the debate on ethics in cultural study, and offers an invaluable source of ideas for students of contemporary culture.

The Cyborg Experiments analyzes the challenges posed to corporeality by techology. Taking as their starting point the work of the highly influential performance artists Orlan and Stelarc, the essays in this timely and important collection raise a number of questions in relation to new conceptions of embodiment, identity and otherness in the age of new technologies: Has the body become obsolete? Does transgender challenge traditional ideas of agency? Have we always been cyborgs?In addition to highlighting the playful character of digital aesthetics, the contributors investigate ethical issues concerning the ownership of our bodies and the experiments we perform on them. In this way the book explores how humanism, and ideas of the human, have been placed under increasing scrutiny as a result of new developments in science, media and communications.Contributors:John Appleby, Rachel Armstrong, Fred Botting, Julie Clarke, Gary Hall, Chris Hables Gray, Meredith Jones, Orlan, Mark Poster, Jay Prosser, E. A. Scheer, Zod Sofia, Stelarc, Scott Wilson, Joanna Zylinska.

Ethical questions feature prominently on today's cultural and political agendas. The Ethics of Cultural Studies presents an ethical manifesto for Cultural Studies, an exploration of its current ethical and political concerns, and of its future challenges. The book focuses on a number of key issues: National, racial and sexual identity; Representation; Violence and the media; The relationship between body and technology; The science-culture 'wars'; The text engages with the writings of the important theorists of ethics and culture: Giorgio Agamben; Judith Butler; Jacques Derrida; Stuart Hall; Donna Haraway; N. Katherine Hayles; Ernesto Laclau; Emmanuel Levinas; Jean-Francois Lyotard; Samuel Weber; The book is concerned with ethics in the material world, and draws on examples as diverse as cloning and genetics, asylum and immigration, experiments in plastic surgery and in electronic and digital art, memories of the Holocaust, September 11th and media representations of violence and crime. The Ethics of Cultural Studies is a groundbreaking intervention that sets the debate on ethics in cultural study, and offers an invaluable source of ideas for students of contemporary culture.

An argument for a shift in understanding new media-from a fascination with devices to an examination of the complex processes of mediation. In Life after New Media, Sarah Kember and Joanna Zylinska make a case for a significant shift in our understanding of new media. They argue that we should move beyond our fascination with objects-computers, smart phones, iPods, Kindles-to an examination of the interlocking technical, social, and biological processes of mediation. Doing so, they say, reveals that life itself can be understood as mediated-subject to the same processes of reproduction, transformation, flattening, and patenting undergone by other media forms. By Kember and Zylinska's account, the dispersal of media and technology into our biological and social lives intensifies our entanglement with nonhuman entities. Mediation-all-encompassing and indivisible-becomes for them a key trope for understanding our being in the technological world. Drawing on the work of Bergson and Derrida while displaying a rigorous playfulness toward philosophy, Kember and Zylinska examine the multiple flows of mediation. Importantly, they also consider the ethical necessity of making a "cut" to any media processes in order to contain them. Considering topics that range from media-enacted cosmic events to the intelligent home, they propose a new way of "doing" media studies that is simultaneously critical and creative, and that performs an encounter between theory and practice.

A new philosophy of photography that goes beyond humanist concepts to consider imaging practices from which the human is absent, as both subject and agent. Today, in the age of CCTV, drones, medical body scans, and satellite images, photography is increasingly decoupled from human agency and human vision. In Nonhuman Photography, Joanna Zylinska offers a new philosophy of photography, going beyond the human-centric view to consider imaging practices from which the human is absent. Zylinska argues further that even those images produced by humans, whether artists or amateurs, entail a nonhuman, mechanical element-that is, they involve the execution of technical and cultural algorithms that shape our image-making devices as well as our viewing practices. At the same time, she notes, photography is increasingly mobilized to document the precariousness of the human habitat and tasked with helping us imagine a better tomorrow. With its conjoined human-nonhuman agency and vision, Zylinska claims, photography functions as both a form of control and a life-shaping force. Zylinska explores the potential of photography for developing new modes of seeing and imagining, and presents images from her own photographic project, Active Perceptual Systems. She also examines the challenges posed by digitization to established notions of art, culture, and the media. In connecting biological extinction and technical obsolescence, and discussing the parallels between photography and fossilization, she proposes to understand photography as a light-induced process of fossilization across media and across time scales.