Abstract

A World of Contradictions foregrounds 18 original essays by senior and emerging scholars that take the form of an extended transnational conversation on the crises and challenges afflicting contemporary societies in the era of globalization. These essays bring historical relief and theoretical and concrete empirical focus to what the authors regard as the multiheaded planetary crises of climate change, the lingering effects of the covid pandemic, global economic downturn, and the proliferation of war and the impact of these dynamics on late modern institutions and futures for late modern subjects—particularly the superexploited, marginalized and displaced members of the poorer and precarious classes. Where opulence and obscene forms of wealth are too often juxtaposed to desperate poverty and social abandonment. And where the dominant forms of communication and exchange, now led forward by digitalization and AI, have not only accelerated communication among human subjects but have subverted all human harmony and have increased the propensities for isolation, antagonism and aggression in the socius. In A World of Contradictions, contributors pay special attention to these developments at particular flash points of contradiction, mutation and change in areas such as urban and suburban gentrification, the formation of policy discourses, racial antagonism, migration, AI, video games and electrified culture, art and aesthetics and the organization of knowledge itself in universities and schooling.