Working from a psychoanalytic tradition, Renata Salecl demonstrates the important role that unconscious emotions and desires play in shaping subjectivity and agency. More precisely, she brings Lacanian theory to bear on questions of why and how we embrace economic rationalism as well as how these processes inhibit social change.

In this daring book, Julie Guthman peels back layers of entrenched thought on “obesity” and its “epidemic” extent, showing how “problem closure” has propelled science and debate into inaccurate and harmful cul-de-sacs. Combining her groundbreaking research on aspects of alternative food with secondary material from the health sciences, she moves the book toward the concluding argument: in fatness and obesity panic, the body is an accumulation strategy.

In 2011, as the scramble from above for a status-quo-preserving scheme to deleverage the global economy entered its third year, two books approaching debt from a less lofty angle were released. "The Bonds of Debt by Richard Dienst, and Debt: The First 5,000 Years" by David Graeber, both ask what it ought to mean to live with debt today, and, in Graeber’s case, what it has meant historically.