Together, Somehow

Music, Affect, and Intimacy on the Dancefloor LUIS MANUEL GARCIA-MISPIRETA

In Together, Somehow, Luis Manuel Garcia-Mispireta examines how people find ways to get along and share a dancefloor, a vibe, and a sound. Drawing on time spent in the minimal techno and house music sub-scenes in Chicago, Paris, and Berlin as the first decade of the new millennium came to a close, Garcia-Mispireta explains this bonding in terms of what he calls stranger-intimacy: the kind of warmth, sharing, and vulnerability between people that happens surprisingly often at popular electronic dance music parties. He shows how affect lubricates the connections between music and the dancers. Intense shared senses of sound and touch help support a feeling of belonging to a larger social world. However, as Garcia-Mispireta points out, this sense of belonging can be vague, fluid, and may hide exclusions and injustices. By showing how sharing a dancefloor involves feeling, touch, sound, sexuality, and subculture, Garcia-Mispireta rethinks intimacy and belonging through dancing crowds and the utopic vision of throbbing dancefloors.

Luis Manuel Garcia-Mispireta is Associate Professor in Ethnomusicology and Popular Music Studies at the University of Birmingham.

Petrochemical Planet

Multiscalar Battles of Industrial Transformation ALICE

MAH

September 2023

240 pages

Sociology / Activism /Environmental Studies

Rights: World

In Petrochemical Planet Alice Mah examines the changing nature of the petrochemical industry as it faces the existential threats of climate change and environmental activism. Drawing on research from high-level industry meetings, petrochemical plant tours, and polluted communities, Mah juxtaposes the petrochemical industry’s destructive corporate worldviews with environmental justice struggles in the United States, China, and Europe. She argues that amid intensifying public pressures, a profound planetary industrial transformation is under way that is challenging the reigning age of plastics and fossil fuels. This challenge comes from what Mah calls multiscalar activism—a form of collective resistance that spans local, regional, national, and planetary sites and scales and addresses the interconnected issues of environmental justice, climate, pollution, health, extraction, land rights, workers’ rights, systemic racism, and toxic colonialism.

Alice Mah is Professor of Sociology at the University of Warwick and author of Plastic Unlimited: How Corporations Are Fuelling the Ecological Crisis and What We Can Do About It.