The Ethics of Extremity

On Hearing, Seeing, and Feeling Each Other

Nelson Varas-Díaz, Vivek Venkatesh

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2026
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9798216263197
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory
• Index: Social Sciences

The Ethics of Extremity critically examines how we can understand, interact with, and intervene in a world where what was once considered extreme has become normalized as part of everyday life.
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.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Figures and Tables
• Chapter 1: Toward an Ethics of Extremity
• Section I: Engagement in an Uncomfortable Closeness
• Chapter 2: Hard Listening: An Ethics of Extremity
• Section II: Seeing/Feeling Extremity Anew
• Chapter 3: Invisible in Plain Sight: The Ethics of Participatory Photography among Street-Based Heroin Users in the Dominican Republic
• Chapter 4: Quixotism as Extremity: The Aesthetics and Politics of Occlusion
• Chapter 5: Miniaturization and the Ethical Magnification of Extremity
• Chapter 6: “We Shall by Morning Inherit the Earth”1: Eco-Horror and the Limits of Ethics
• Chapter 7: When the Game Is Not a Game: Extremity and the Politics of Combat Sports
• Section III: 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
• Chapter 9: Examining Marketing Practices and Products That Facilitate Religious Extremism
• Section IV: Rethinking Illegality
• Chapter 10: One Needle at a Time: Illegal Communal Acupuncture in Disaster-Stricken Puerto Rico
• Chapter 11: Ethics of Addressing Extreme Poverty: Permanent Supportive Housing as Social Infrastructure for the Formerly Unhoused in Miami-Dade County
• Section V: 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
• Chapter 13: Discomfort as an Axis of Arts-Based Social Pedagogy: Ethics of Dissension in an Era of Polarization
• About the Editors
• About the Contributors
• Index