Against Purity: Living Ethically in Compromised Times

Description

In Against Purity, Alexis Shotwell proposes a powerful new conception of social movements as custodians for the past and incubators for liberated futures. Against Purity undertakes an analysis that draws on theories of race, disability, gender, and animal ethics as a foundation for an innovative approach to the politics and ethics of responding to systemic problems.

Alexis Shotwell is Associate Professor of Sociology and Anthropology, and the Department of Philosophy, at Carleton University. She is the author of Knowing Otherwise: Race, Gender, and Implicit Understanding.

"Exciting, original, and intellectually stimulating, Against Purity makes a clear and compelling argument for a politics of relationality that resists the demand for 'purity'. Even as Alexis Shotwell challenges the basic assumptions of ethical and political philosophy, she also builds pathways for more conventional thinkers to find their way into her discourse."-Lisa Guenther, author of Solitary Confinement: Social Death and Its Afterlives "Readers will find Against Purity to be timely and important, drawing together distinct but nonetheless congruent strains of theorizing that enable and facilitate new modes of collective action."-PhaenEx, Journal of Existential and Phenomenological Theory and Culture "On a planet overtaken by the problems and figure of man, this perspective is crucial to keep in mind for both scholarly and worldly work."-Journal of Cultural Economy "Shotwell's clearly ordered prose makes a wide citational range easily accessible. ...Against Purity is an informative and exciting text."-Enculturation, A Journal of Rhetoric, Writing and Culture