Greetings from Prickly Paradigm — we’re back in your inbox with another edition of Prickly Dispatches.
We have lots to share with you this November. With another political earthquake anticipated on Tuesday, and Wednesday’s release of our latest book, How Do We Think About Population in the Anthropocene?, Prickly Paradigm Press is extending its legacy of producing fresh, prickly perspectives on the critical issues of the day. Pamphlet Forum contributors George Tsakraklides, Jenny Andersson and Giulia Dal Maso consider the political and existential implications of How Do We Think About Population in the Anthropocene?. Grant Farred offers an election-inflected update to Grievance: In Fragments. And David Henkin, author of the forthcoming Spring 2026 pamphlet Rooting Interests: Party Politics and Spectator Sports, considers the historical and contemporary entanglement of politics and spectator sports.
Read on for the latest in Prickly Dispatches.
Out this Wednesday: How Do We Think About Population in the Anthropocene?
Our latest pamphlet, How Do We Think About Population In the Anthropocene?, edited by Alison Bashford, Duncan Kelly and David Nally, is officially in print this Wednesday, Nov. 4. You can purchase it here, or read a digitally enhanced version online.
Human population growth has long been treated as one of the defining drivers of humanity’s growing impact on the Earth. Yet “population” is also a deeply contested category, entangled with histories of colonialism, reproductive control, racialization, inequality, and political power.
How Do We Think About Population in the Anthropocene? brings together twelve experts—historians, geographers, demographers, political theorists, geologists, and other scholars—to reconsider the question. In offering critical rethinking drawn from gender studies, economy, and history, each essay forcefully deconstructs the abstract, reified category of “population.” The ecological consequences of human life are shaped by how people live, what they consume, the infrastructures they inhabit, the political and economic systems in which they participate, and the unequal distribution of responsibility and vulnerability. Taking these and other dimensions seriously is the only way to rethink the politics of population growth in the Anthropocene.
Pamphlet Forum
The Forum is a space for invited experts to weigh in on our pamphlets. Tackling the dilemmas presented within How Do We Think About Population in the Anthropocene?, author and biologist George Tsakraklides highlights the siloed nature of population discussions. Meanwhile, historian Jenny Andersson contends that these discussions must not ignore the pernicious potentialities of Longtermism and extinction. Development studies scholar Giulia Dal Maso brings the ironies of longevity capitalism into the conversation.
In anticipation of the 2026 midterms, Grant Farred considers Grievance, and David Henkin recounts how electoral politics have transformed into one big football game.
Grant Farred returns to Grievance: In Fragments (Prickly Paradigm Press, 2024) in postulating that Grievance bound together the strange bedfellows of Trump’s political bloc. Now that the Aggrieved cannot lay the responsibility for their economic troubles at the feet of the Other, toward whom will they turn their ire?
In light of the billion-plus dollars wagered on the outcomes via prediction markets, David Henkin reminds us of the discomfiting entanglements that have always linked betting, voting, and predicting.
Read these reviews and provocations on our website and Substack.
Forthcoming Pamphlets This Spring
We have an exciting lineup for Spring 2027.
This March, we’re thrilled to publish art historian and critic Hal Foster’s Modernism, An Incomplete Project. Foster considers how transgression has become a weapon of the Right, and how staples of critical theory, such as the critique of the subject, are transformed in the age of artificial intelligence. How might the constructive, even utopian, dimension of modernist art be remotivated in the face of ecological catastrophe, and how might this move free us from a melancholic fixation on a past viewed only as traumatic?
In April, historian David Henkin’s Rooting Interests: Party Politics and Spectator Sports traces the overlapping and mutually informing ideas of partisanship in spectator sports and party politics.
And in May, under our imprint Ode Books, devoted to book spaces and readers, we’ll release literary scholar Alan Tansman’s Reading Behind Bars. Tansman draws on his experience teaching at the San Quentin Correctional Facility in Marin County, California to meditate on how literature can function as a medium of lived experience rather than mere intellectual abstraction.
You can preorder these titles, as well as our entire backlist of 65 pamphlets, on the website of our distributor, the University of Chicago Press, or browse our catalogue at pricklyparadigm.com.
That’s all for now. See you next time.
