1. What a Beautiful Crochet Reef. Decolonial Options and the
Delinking of Social Sciences as Conceptual-Empirical
Laboratories
2. From Class to Identity… and Back Again? A Geopolitical
Question
3. Danse Macabre: The Sacred, the Rational, and the Algorithm
4. Implifications: Biomedical Relevance, Digital Cultural Health
Capital, and Governance 3.0
5. Cyborg Gazing Patient Vitreous: The Body as Technology,
Technological Object, and Techno-Normativity
6. The Digital Classroom
7. In Plena Vita—Before and Beyond the Curtain Call
Alexander I. Stingl is lecturer in the College of Liberal Arts at Leuphana University. He is also visiting fellow in social sciences at the University of Kassel.
In a time when media, social media, nations, and educational
settings feed ideas to us in increasingly small sound-bites that
are digested on the run, it is refreshing to find a book which
takes the time to delve into ontological and epistemic questions
relevant to our digitally infused world today. Stingl disentangles
the meaning of digital culture and how power and inequality become
manifest within digital realms with great care.... For those who
can manage the work, in unpacking the implications of Digital
Culture and the digital coloniality of power, Stingl’s love of
language, philosophy, and ideas comes through as he revels not only
in ideas, but in words and word-play. Stingl, however, does not get
lost in his rhetoric but rather still has the impassioned
commitment to sociology required to get fired up while practicing
epistemic disobedience.
*Symbolic Interaction*
Today, the internet has become what Jorge Luis Borges called the
“Total Library,” and with it, a Promethean promised has been loudly
proclaimed: digital culture shall make you free! This incredible
book, a Rabelaisian Carnival of knowledges, urges us to see through
these myths. Today, the internet and its whole new digital culture
has become another means to update and upgrade the hegemony of the
Global North over the old and new Global South. Here disciplinary
irreverence yields conceptual illumination. Henceforth, when you
google you will do so with trepidation but in defiance.
*Eduardo Mendieta, Professor of Philosophy, Pennsylvania State
University*
This inventive and unconventional book covers so much intellectual
territory that it is at home everywhere and nowhere—a nomadic,
ronin-like text. While the text is chocked-full of thoughtful and
provocative tangents, Stingl's chief aim is to establish openings
and platforms for theorists who want to challenge business-as-usual
in the social sciences, and he does so with palpable success based
on insights from the broader project of decoloniality and a serious
critique of salvation by "digital" means. A comment on style:
Stingl's writing is melodic and dark, but a kernel of hope
underlies every sentence, every turn-of-phrase. I found the book at
once disturbing and enchanting.
*Nicholas Rowland, Pennsylvania State University*
An erudite and intrepid book! It exposes the colonial
epistemologies framing today’s digital culture and raises crucial
questions about the possibilities of a decolonial sociology.
*Jyoti Puri, Simmons College*
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