Gray Media: A Psychopolitics of Deception

FORTHCOMING Spring 2027

In the era of artificial intelligence, how can we tell we are being tricked? Indeed, is deception an anomaly or rather a defining force in contemporary media, culture, and politics? In Gray Media: A Psychopolitics of Deception, Lisa Blackman tracks deception as it emerges across AI and algorithmic systems, information warfare, and the psychological and[…]

Winter Light: On Late Life’s Radiance

Published: 02/28/2025

In the contemporary West, the elderly are regarded as somehow “other,” no longer who they used to be, no longer full members of the worlds they once inhabited. Being old is seen as a medical management issue. But old age is not a defective version of what preceded it; it is—like childhood, adolescence, and middle[…]

Taunting the Useful

Published: 08/06/2024

In an epoch driven by hyper-consumption and marvelously destructive futility, and in the context of a hegemonic utilitarianism where one goes to university to work rather than to “develop a meaningful philosophy of life,” the concept of the useful is perhaps one most in need of interrogation. Taunting the Useful seeks to unsettle notions of[…]

Staying Alive

Published: 10/21/2013

Staying Alive: A Survival Manual for the Liberal Arts fiercely defends the liberal arts in and from an age of neoliberal capital and techno-corporatization run amok, arguing that the public university’s purpose is not vocational training, but rather the cultivation of what Fradenburg calls “artfulness,” including the art of making knowledge. In addition to sustained[…]