Bøger af James M. Thomas

Not every story has a happy ending. The near future. Justice is corrupt, logic gives way to senseless passion, fear is propagated by the government. Respect, dignity, and integrity are replaced by blood, lust, and torture. They are hunting you. While you suffer, others are having fun. This world, where citizens are more interested in recording a deadly event rather than saving a life, is were evil lies. A small band of people must battle the terror of a supreme company to survive. Being forced into an underground bunker, Tommy faces an unbelievable challenge; reality. But it's not so easy to survive when he discovers the dark tunnels lined with blood. Even worse, Tommy's girlfriend, Dahria, seems to be in the crosshairs of this crazed person. Together with a small group of people, they struggle against an unknown killer who seems to greatly enjoy the deeds. And is hungry to play more games.

Affective Labour explores four distinct landscapes in order to demonstrate how collective feelings are organized by social actors in order to both reproduce and contest hegemony. Utilizing a variety of methods, including participant observation, in-depth interviews across field sites, and content analysis of mass media, Correa and Thomas demonstrate the centrality of affective labor in enabling and constraining prevailing norms and practices of race, citizenship, class, gender, and sexuality across multiple spatial contexts: the U.S.- Mexico border, urban nightlife districts, American college campuses, and emergent social movements against the police state. The book demonstrates how the power of affective labour might be harnessed for progressively oriented world-building projects, including what the authors term an ';affective labour from below.' By tying an analysis of affective labour into movements for social justice, the authors aim to produce a critical theory of the world that can be practically applied.

For decades, stand-up comedy has been central to the imbrication of popular culture and political discourse, reshaping the margins of political critique, and often within the contexts of urban nightlife entertainment. In Working to Laugh: Assembling Difference in American Stand-Up Comedy Venues, James M. Thomas (JT) provides an ethnographic analysis of urban nightlife sites where this popular form of entertainment occurs. Examining the relationship between the performance, the venue, and the social actors who participate in these scenes, JT demonstrates how stand-up venues function as both enablers and constrainers of social difference, including race, class, gender, and heteronormativity, within the larger urban nightlife environment. JT's analysis of a professional comedy club and a sub-cultural bar that hosts a weekly comedy show illuminates the full range of stand-up comedy in the American cultural milieu, from the highly organized, routinized, and predictable format of the professional venue, to the more unpredictable, and in some cases, cutting edge format of the amateur show.