If you are looking for something new and interesting to read in and amongst all the excitement, then look out for (or, pre-order) a new collection edited by Jane Wills and Bob Lake entitled The Power of Pragmatism. Further details are here. This is what it’s about:

“This book makes the case for a pragmatist approach to the practice of social inquiry and knowledge production. Through diverse examples from multiple disciplines, contributors explore the power of pragmatism to inform a practice of inquiry that is democratic, community-centred, problem-oriented and experimental. Drawing from both classical and neo-pragmatist perspectives, the book advances a pragmatist sensibility in which truth and knowledge are contingent rather than universal, made rather than found, provisional rather than dogmatic, subject to continuous experimentation rather than ultimate proof, and verified in their application in action rather than in the accuracy of their representation of an antecedent reality. The Power of Pragmatism offers a path forward for mobilizing the practice of inquiry and knowledge production on behalf of achieving what Dewey called a sense for the better kind of life to be led.”

And this is who is in it:

Part I: The power of pragmatism
1 Introduction: The power of pragmatism – Jane Wills and Robert W. Lake

Part II: Key thinkers, core ideas and their application to social research
2 Habits of social inquiry and reconstruction: A Deweyan vision of democracy and social research – Malcolm Cutchin
3 Appreciating the situation: Dewey’s pragmatism and its implications for the spatialisation of social science – Gary Bridge
4 Mead, subjectivity and urban politics – Crispian Fuller
5 Rorty, conversation and the power of maps – Trevor Barnes

Part III: ‘Truth’, epistemic injustice and academic practice
6 Embodied inequalities: Can we go beyond epistemologies of ignorance in pragmatic knowledge projects? – Susan Saegert
7 Truth and academia in times of fake news, alternative facts, and filter bubbles: A pragmatist notion of critique as mediation – Klaus Geiselhart
8 Learning from experience: Pragmatism and politics in place – Alice Huff
9 Reflections on an experiment in pragmatic social research and knowledge production – Liam Harney and Jane Wills

Part IV: Disciplinary applications in pragmatic research
10 Ecological crisis, action and pragmatic humanism – Meg Holden
11 Pragmatism, anti-representational theory and local methods for critical-creative ecological action – Owain Jones
12 Pragmatism and contemporary planning theory: Going beyond a communicative approach – Ihnji Jon
13 Exploring possibilities for a pragmatic orientation in development studies – Alireza F. Farahani and Azadeh Hadizadeh Esfahani

Part V: Conclusion and postscript
14 The quest for uncertainty: Pragmatism between rationalism and sentimentality – Robert W. Lake
15 Postscript: Who’s afraid of pragmatism? – Clive Barnett