The inaugural Theory, Culture & Society Summer School 2023 will take place from 11-16 September 2023, at the University of Klagenfurt, Austria.

• Full details available online here.

The Summer School seeks to provide a dynamic and inclusive forum for research, aimed at established and early career researchers, and also providing opportunities for postgraduate students.

The University of Klagenfurt, situated in the Austrian Alps, provides an inspiring location, where participants will have the opportunity to explore contemporary critical debates, enhance skills and literacies for research and publishing, and share in a cultural program. A key theme for this year's gathering is "Digital Publics: Images, Discourse & Screens", building on the recent Special Issue of Theory, Culture & Society, ‘A New Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere?’ (edited by Martin Seeliger Sebastian Sevignani; and including a new contemporary reflection by Jürgen Habermas).

Places are limited. Participants can apply via an online platform by providing a CV. As part of a "work-in-progress" strand, participants also can apply to discuss their research projects with the wider group (more details are available online).

The course fee is 400 Euro if you apply by 1 June 2023, after which the fee is 500 Euro. The fee covers all seminars, workshops, and cultural programs, as well as lunch and refreshments over 5 days. 4 travel bursaries (500 Euro) will be provided based on the quality of individual applications and with attention given to supporting diversity. To be eligible for consideration for the travel bursary, applications must be submitted by 19 June 2023.

—Mike Featherstone, Sunil Manghani, Tomoko Tamari, and Rainer Winter

Andrew Feenberg, who holds the holds the Canada Research Chair in the Philosophy of Technology in the School of Communication at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada, is the author of Lukács, Marx and the Sources of Critical Theory (1981), Critical Theory of Technology (1991), Alternative Modernity (1995), Questioning Technology (1999), When Poetry Ruled the Streets: The May Events of 1968 (2001), Transforming Technology (2002), Heidegger and Marcuse: The Catastrophe and Redemption of History (2005), and Between Reason and Experience: Essays in Technology and Modernity (2010), The Philosophy of Praxis (2014), Technosystem: The Social Life of Reason (2017), and Nishida, Kawabata, and the Japanese Response to Modernity (2019). 

Another timely and very provocative new book from Robert T. Tally Jr. has just been published and is now available.

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From the Los Angeles Review of Books:

Robert Scott probes the “conditions of imagination under late capitalism” in his review of Robert T. Tally Jr.’s For a Ruthless Critique of All That Exists: Literature in an Age of Capitalist Realism. 

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"An exuberant and erudite take-down of those who think things are pretty much OK, so critique is superfluous. Tally calls out the logic and timing of the dog-whistle school of anti-critique, who have done their part to encourage the recent frenzy over Critical Race Theory and other bits of populist anti-intellectualism. But rather than calling its opponents names, this books lays before them a formidably nuanced and eloquent example of critique. We nattering nabobs of negativism have found ourselves a joyous and principled defender."

—Bruce Robbins, Columbia University

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Robert T. Tally Jr. teaches American and world literature at Texas State University. His research and teaching focuses on the relations among space, narrative, and representation, particularly in U.S. and comparative literature, and he is active in the emerging fields of geocriticism, literary geography, and the spatial humanities. Tally is the editor of "Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies," a Palgrave Macmillan book series, and he has published several books, as well as dozens of essays and reviews, on literature, theory, and criticism. Much of his work draws upon and interprets Critical Theory, including the work of Herbert Marcuse.