Liverpool University Press is delighted to announce that the second monograph to feature on Modern Languages Open is Postgrowth Imaginaries: New Ecologies and Counterhegemonic Culture in Post-2008 Spain by Luis I. Prádanos.

Postgrowth Imaginaries brings together environmental cultural studies and postgrowth economics to examine radical cultural shifts sparked by the global financial crisis. The globalization of an economic culture addicted to constant growth destroys the ecological planetary systems while failing to fulfil its social promises. A transition toward what Prádanos calls ‘postgrowth imaginaries’—the counterhegemonic cultural sensibilities that are challenging the growth paradigm—is well underway in the Iberian Peninsula today.

Chloe Johnson, Commissioning Editor for Modern Languages, said, ‘We are very excited to be publishing a second monograph on Modern Languages Open. Open Access is something we are eager to support and I am thrilled that Luis’ book will be freely available on MLO.’

Luis I. Prádanos says, ‘Postgrowth Imaginaries pushes to enlarge the space of what is visible, thinkable, intelligible, perceptible, sayable, and, more importantly, desirable. I hope that if we persist in the construction of postgrowth imaginaries, we may eventually be able to displace the dogmatic neoliberal sequestration of reality and its monologic motto, ‘there is no alternative’. Politics, as Rancière insists, ‘replaces the dogmatism of truth with the search for conditions of possibility’. We desperately need to envision postgrowth imaginaries in which to invest our affects, identities, energy, and creativity. Our (good) life quite literally depends on it. Our lack of political imagination (or, more accurately, our obduracy in maintaining our attachment to the harmful growth imaginary) is undermining such conditions of possibility. My hope is that this book does its humble part in contributing to our communitarian and collaborative search for the conditions of possibility for socially desirable and ecologically viable postgrowth societies to emerge.’

On reviewing the book, Katarzyna Olga Beilin from the University of Wisconsin said “Prádanos’s book will become a necessary reference for all those who will subsequently write about post-growth, environmental studies in the Spanish/Iberian context and related subjects” and Luis Moreno-Caballud from the University of Pennsylvania said that the work “constitutes an urgent, enlightening, and empowering reflection about a crucial subject of our time”.

You can find out more about the book here and read it for free here.

Liverpool University Press is a proud supporter of Open Access publishing with over 40 OA monographs currently available. You can find out more about our OA policy here and browse some of our OA titles on the OAPEN library.