Full Description
The Ethics of Extremity critically examines how we can understand, interact with, and intervene in a world where the once-unthinkable—what was previously considered extreme—has become normalized as part of everyday life.
The contributors invite us to re-examine our explicit and implicit expectations that ethics would curtail extremity—and how those assumptions have frequently failed. This opens up a central question: what is the relationship between ethics and extremity today? Rather than offering fixed solutions to this question, the chapters invite readers to rethink how ethics might respond to a world in which extremity is embedded in everyday experience. Through contributions from scholars, artists, and activists, the volume explores how extremity manifests in areas such as public health, digital media, gender violence, combat sports, and ecological collapse. Drawing on diverse methods and contexts, the book unfolds across five thematic interventions proposed by the authors for grappling with extremity today: engaging in uncomfortable forms of closeness; seeing and feeling extremity anew; reclaiming truth in a post-truth era; rethinking illegality and marginality; and using extremity as a teaching tool. Together, these offer entry points for reimagining what ethical life might look like under conditions of persistent crisis.
Contents
List of Tables and Figures
Chapter 1: Towards an Ethics of Extremity by Nelson Varas-Díaz and Vivek Venkatesh
Section 1: Engagement in an Uncomfortable Closeness
Chapter 2: Hard Listening: An Ethics of Extremity by Veronica Mockler
Chapter 3: Invisible in Plain Sight: The Ethics of Participatory Photography among Street-Based Heroin Users in The Dominican Republic by Mark Padilla
Chapter 4: Quixotism as Extremity: The Aesthetics and Politics of Occlusion by Bradley J. Nelson
Section 2: Seeing/Feeling Extremity Anew
Chapter 5: Miniaturization and the Ethical Magnification of Extremity by Nelson Varas-Díaz
Chapter 6: "We Shall By Morning Inherit the Earth": Eco-horror and the Limits of Ethics by Jason Wallin
Chapter 7: When the Game is not a Game: Extremity and the Politics of Combat Sports Daniel Nevárez Araújo
Section 3: Reclaiming Truth in a Post-Truth Era
Chapter 8: Conspiratorial Illusions and the Monetization of Fundamentalist Fantasies in Our AI Assisted World: Lessons on Extremity from the Cervantes Lab by David R. Castillo
Chapter 9: Examining Marketing Practices and Products that Facilitate Religious Extremism by Jeffrey S. Podoshen
Section 4: Rethinking Illegality
Chapter 10: One Needle at a Time: Illegal Communal Acupuncture in Disaster-Stricken Puerto Rico by Sheilla R. Madera
Chapter 11: Ethics of Addressing Extreme Poverty: Permanent Supportive Housing as Social Infrastructure for the Formerly Unhoused in Miami-Dade County by Matthew D. Marr, Lisa Mueller and Catherine Velarde
Section 5: Extremity as a Teaching Tool
Chapter 12: Extremity as Pedagogy: A Case Study on Gender Training through Feminist Metal Strategies in Contexts of Extreme Violence Against Women by Susana González-Martínez
Chapter 13: Discomfort as an Axis of Arts-Based Social Pedagogy: Ethics of Dissension in an Era of Polarization by Vivek Venkatesh
Index
About the Editors
About the Contributors
