R. Joshua Scannell—The Carceral Surround
How digital technologies entrench state power—and a new vision for resistance

As law enforcement agencies deploy increasingly advanced technologies to suppress dissent, hunt migrants, and target marginalized communities, The Carceral Surround offers a powerful new theory of police and prison power in the digital age. Making sense of the rapid expansion of digital carceral infrastructure in a nation that claims to value freedom and individual rights, R. Joshua Scannell moves beyond familiar debates over privacy to show that understanding digital policing requires confronting the political and racial logics that sustain police power.

Drawing on digital media theory, science and technology studies, critical race and ethnic studies, and carceral theory, The Carceral Surround reveals how twenty-first-century policing is less about managing crime than about governing possibility. Carceral power now operates across every register of daily life through predictive analytics, risk modeling, and algorithmic systems that track, sort, and preempt. From social media archives and facial recognition software to satellite mapping and radiation sensors, Scannell charts how seemingly disparate media converge into an environment of control that links technocratic governance to the maintenance of racial hierarchy and capitalist order.

Tracing today’s technoauthoritarian regime from the NYPD’s assault on Black Lives Matter protesters in 2020 to the Stop LAPD Spying Coalition’s campaign to end predictive policing contracts, The Carceral Surround is a rare hybrid of critique and refusal, illuminating the digital logic of US authoritarianism while imagining pathways for collective resistance beyond its grasp.

David Bering-Porter—Undead Labor

How the zombie represents capitalism’s fantasy of limitless labor

Much more than just an enduring figure of horror entertainment, the zombie is a uniquely modern symbol representing capitalism’s most brutal demands on human life. Examining the push to extract surplus value from human bodies in ways that exceed their natural limits, David Bering-Porter shows how this notion of the undead is both integral to and symptomatic of capitalism’s endless cycle of growth and consumption.

Bering-Porter demonstrates how the zombie has long been deeply intertwined with issues of race and exploitation, from its origins in the slave plantations of colonial Haiti to its traces in the continuing evolution of artificial intelligence systems, serving as capitalism’s ideal worker: one that never rests, never stops, and never dies. Featuring close readings of Marx alongside films such as I Walked with a Zombie, The Blob, and Night of the Living Dead, the book traces the concept of undead labor as it manifests across various historical epochs, providing insight into the manifold ways that capitalism has sought to transform living beings into instruments of limitless production.

As he weaves together critical race studies with an analysis of popular culture and media, Bering-Porter interrogates racialized capitalism and its fantasy of labor beyond all limits. By highlighting how the zombie is borne of the same ideology that has given rise to contemporary burnout culture and environmental collapse, Undead Labor uncovers the capitalist system’s relentless death drive with the hope that it finally may be put to rest.