Culture Machine is a series of books from Berg dedicated to publishing the most exciting new work in culture and theory. 

Like the Culture Machine journal, the Culture Machine book series is characterised by its:

• disciplinary and theoretical breadth: the Culture Machine book series brings together writers from the full range of relevant arts, social science and humanities disciplines - cultural, media and communication studies; literary, critical and cultural theory; new media; art history; anthropology; continental philosophy; sociology and political science - with a view to generating cross-disciplinary negotiation and fertilization

• innovative, provocative and challenging nature: the Culture Machine book series is concerned to publish and promote work which is engaged in the constitution of new areas of inquiry and the opening of new frontiers of cultural and theoretical activity

• exciting mix of new voices and more prominent figures: the Culture Machine book series publishes both 'rising stars' as well as more established authors.

The latest publication in the Culture Machine series is:

Clare Birchall, KNOWLEDGE GOES POP: FROM CONSPIRACY THEORY TO GOSSIP

Berg   /   August 2006   /   185pp   /   PB: £16.99   /   ISBN:1 84520 143 4

A voice on late night radio tells you that Kentucky Fried Chicken injects 
its food with drugs that render men impotent. A colleague asks if you think 
the FBI was in on 9/11. An alien abductee on the Internet claims 
extraterrestrials have planted a microchip in her left buttock. 'Julia 
Roberts in Porn Scandal' shouts the front page of a gossip mag. A spiritual 
healer claims he can cure chronic fatigue syndrome with the energizing power 
of crystals.

Knowledge Goes Pop examines the popular knowledges that saturate our 
everyday experience. We mediate and are mediated by them; they influence the 
way we position ourselves in the world and shape the way we imagine the 
world works. Naming such wayward phenomena 'knowledge' prompts vital 
questions about the status of legitimacy. Do popular knowledges get 
marginalized by official discourse? What challenge do they pose to approved 
sites of knowledge like the university? Why does their irrepressible 
presence cause so much institutional anxiety?

Clare Birchall's dual enquiry asks not only what cultural studies can tell 
us about the politics of popular knowledges (at a time when wars can be 
waged on the basis of gossip and conspiracy theory saturates all kinds of 
public discourse), but also what popular knowledges can tell us about 
cultural studies itself as a discipline of uncertain, ambiguous legitimacy 
and marginal origins.
 

Other books published in the Culture Machine series include:

Charlie Gere, ART TIME AND TECHNOLOGY 
Berg   /   May 2006   /   160pp   /   HB: £16.99   /   ISBN:1 84520 135 3
 

Paul Virilio, CITY OF PANIC
Translated by Julie Rose
Berg   /   August 2005   /   195pp   /   PB: £16.99   /   ISBN:1 84520 224 4
 

Forthcoming books in the Culture Machine series include:

Jeremy Gilbert, Anti-Capitalism and Culture: Radical Theory and the Global Justice Movement 
Charles Baldwin, The Last technological Revolution
 

For further information please contact the series editor

Gary Hall
Professor of Media and Performing Arts
School of Art and Design
Priory Street
Coventry CV1 5FB
email: gary.hall@coventry.ac.uk