John P. Murphy – författare

A fresh and vibrant account of the USA's New Deal art programmes, highlighting diversity, activism, social justice, and urgent lessons for today. Franklin D. Roosevelt’s landslide victory in the USA's 1932 presidential election gave him a mandate to institute a 'New Deal' for US citizens, and by so doing offer them 'a more abundant life'. For a decade between 1933 and 1943 the New Deal art programs marked the largest federal investment in the arts in the history of the country. Tens of thousands of artists and artisans across the country produced some 2,500 murals, 100,000 easel paintings, 17,000 sculptures, and 200,000 prints. How should we understand the history and legacy of the New Deal art programs today? Marshalling new scholarship and original research, New Deal Art highlights the contributions of a diverse range of women, immigrant, working class, Indigenous, Black, Asian, Jewish, Latinx and LGBTQ+ artists. While previous studies have focused on the personalities and politics of government administrators, this book offers a 'history from below' that stresses the role of artists as activists through collective efforts such as the Artists Union and the American Artists Congress. It explores topics that traditionally fall outside the purview of art history: art as therapy in prisons and hospitals, children’s art, community art centres and art education, and the place of handicrafts and applied arts. Above all, New Deal Art centres the question of art and democracy: What if art was treated as a natural resource to which all citizens had an equal right?

In the first decade of the twenty-first century, France underwent a particularly turbulent period during which urban riots in 2005 and labor protests in 2006 galvanized people across the country and brought the question of youth unemployment among its poorer, multiethnic outer cities into the national spotlight.Drawing on more than a year of ethnographic field research in the housing projects of the French city of Limoges, Yearning to Labor chronicles the everyday struggles of a group of young people as they confront unemployment at more than triple the national rate-and the crushing despair it engenders. Against the background of this ethnographic context, John P. Murphy illuminates how the global spread of neoliberal ideologies and practices is experienced firsthand by contemporary urban youths in the process of constructing their identities. An original investigation of the social ties that produce this community, Yearning to Labor explores the ways these young men and women respond to the challenges of economic liberalization, deindustrialization, and social exclusion.At its heart, Yearning to Labor asks if the French republican model of social integration, assimilation, and equality before the law remains viable in a context marked by severe economic exclusion in communities of ethnic and religious diversity. Yearning to Labor is both an ethnographic account of a certain group of French youths as they navigate a suffocating job market and an analysis of the mechanisms underlying the shifting economic inequalities at the beginning of the twenty-first century.

Broke and out of fuel, a wildcat asteroid miner comes to Station 35 looking to sell her cargo and get back to the life of solitude she craves. Instead, the cheating thieves who run the place leave her deep in debt.Desperate to get away, she finds herself swept up in a three-way standoff between gangs and crooked cops. Faced with the decision to take sides or clean out the Augean Stables, she breaks out the flamethrower…File Under: Science Fiction [ Jane Got a Gun | Gangster's Paradise | Debts and Deceptions | There Shall Be Blood ]

Caught up in a space station turf war between gangs and corrupt law, a lone asteroid miner decides to take them all down.When an asteroid miner comes to Station 35 looking to sell her cargo and get back to the solitude she craves, she gets swept up in a three-way standoff with gangs and crooked cops. Faced with either taking sides or cleaning out the Augean Stables, she breaks out the flamethrower.