Stencil Pirates is the most comprehensive book dedicated to the street art of the stencil. The book contains an exhaustive collection of close to 1000 photographs from around the globe. The photos show work by hundreds of different artists, exposing the width and breadth of stencil graffiti, from political to abstract and purely aesthetic, from tagging to public announcements. Stencil Pirates offers in-depth writings on the complex history of stencil graffiti, its political context, and how stencils fit into the larger pantheon of street expression. It discusses stenciling as a way for political movements to resist and mark territory, whether as part of gentrification struggles in New York and San Francisco or as part of the general uprising in Argentina over the past couple years. Stencil artists are the printmakers of the urban landscape, dropping art on sidewalks, walls, park benches, bus stops, store windows, etc. By far the most accessible form of printmaking, stencil artists simply need a piece of cardboard, a knife, a can of spray paint and something to express. Stenciling is a form of expression that boldly reclaims public space by inserting political or metaphysical messages into corporate landscapes.

Six stencils recall fearsome maritime marauders: skull and crossbones, pirate ship, treasure chest, peg-legged fellow with a sword, 2 more.

In this entirely original collection, stencil maverick Ed Roth presents 25 brand-new stencil designs from retro-cool typewriters, microphones, and roller skates to elegant leaves, birds, and abstract shapes. Ed also offers step-by-step directions for more than 20 wildly creative projects that take stenciling to a whole new level. With the help of creative friends such as Erica Domesek of P.S. - I made this and embroidery queen Jenny Hart, Ed shows how to stencil on just about anything T-shirts, leather, mirrors, food, and even hair using a variety of techniques like stitching, etching, and more.

The Great Recession in Fiction, Film, and Television: Twenty-First-Century Bust Culture sheds light on how imaginary works of fiction, film, and television reflect, refract, and respond to the recessionary times specific to the twenty-first century, a sustained period of economic crisis that has earned the title the “Great Recession.” This collection takes as its focus “Bust Culture,” a concept that refers to post-crash popular culture, specifically the kind mass produced by multinational corporations in the age of media conglomeration, which is inflected by diminishment, influenced by scarcity, and infused with anxiety. The multidisciplinary contributors collected here examine mass culture not typically included in discussions of the financial meltdown, from disaster films to reality TV hoarders, the horror genre to reactionary representations of women, Christian right radio to Batman, television characters of color to graphic novels and literary fiction. The collected essays treat our busted culture as a seismograph that registers the traumas of collapse, and locate their pop artifacts along a spectrum of ideological fantasies, social erasures, and profound fears inspired by the Great Recession. What they discover from these unlikely indicators of the recession is a mix of regressive, progressive, and bemused texts in need of critical translation.

Metropedagogy: Power, Justice and the Urban Classroom Joe Kincheloe McGill University and kecia hayes (Eds.) The Graduate Center, City University of New York What might it mean to develop a rigorous, just, and practical urban education? Such a question takes on new importance in the middle of the first decade of the twenty-first century, as urban educators find themselves besieged with test-driven, standardized curricula promoted in the name of fairness, educational excellence, and egalitarianism. Those who promote these standardized curricula fail to account for the unique situations and need.

Over the last couple of decades, an ideological battle has raged over the political legacy and cultural symbolism of the “golden age” pirates who roamed the seas between the Caribbean Islands and the Indian Ocean from roughly 1690 to 1725. They are depicted as romanticized villains on the one hand and as genuine social rebels on the other. Life Under the Jolly Roger examines the political and cultural significance of these nomadic outlaws by relating historical accounts to a wide range of theoretical concepts—reaching from Marshall Sahlins and Pierre Clastres to Mao Zedong and Eric J. Hobsbawm via Friedrich Nietzsche and Michel Foucault. With daring theoretical speculation and passionate, respectful inquiry, Gabriel Kuhn skillfully contextualizes and analyzes the meanings of race, gender, sexuality, and disability in golden age pirate communities, while also surveying the breathtaking array of pirates’ forms of organization, economy, and ethics. Life Under the Jolly Roger also provides an extensive catalog of scholarly references for the academic reader. Yet this delightful and engaging study is written in language that is wholly accessible for a wide audience. This expanded second edition includes two new prefaces and an appendix with interviews about contemporary piracy, the ongoing fascination with pirate imagery, and the thorny issue of colonial implications in the romanticization of pirates.