This is an animate lexicon, overflowing with pulsating and creative concepts. Van der Tuin and Verhoeff are engaged with what concepts can do, and what they can make happen, rather than trying to capture a spurious ‘classifixation’ of what they are. The authors do not so much offer definitions as stage a series of potentialities, novel directions in which to take concepts, or indeed, to be taken by them. The conceptual territory traversed is at once familiar and foreign, provoking feelings of the uncanny. This brilliant and seriously playful work enacts its own incitement to the reader: to connect, to create, to articulate, and to activate new ways of thinking-being, in the service of a vibrant future.
— Moira Gatens, Challis Professor of Philosophy, University of Sydney
This book is a gem. The ways that the authors approach the dictionary format, through the notion of concepts-in-the-making, arts-based creative methods and practices, is innovative and entirely appropriate to its aim to compile and expand the creative humanities. The authors are both leaders in their fields and are ideally positioned and eminently experienced. Their ground-breaking conceptual approach goes beyond a textbook and performs the field that it explores.
— Rebecca Coleman, reader in sociology, Goldsmiths, University of London
Exploring the potentialities of creative humanities, this book will contribute substantially to the research field. The book’s strengths are its focus on concepts as always performative and methodological, and engagement with nature-culture and theory-practice complexities and openness. The authors represent a strong theoretical foundation and thoroughness. There is absolutely a need for didactic texts like this, that are fitting for the contemporary interdisciplinary and collaborative research culture of a new generation of thinkers and makers.
— Anne Beate Reinertsen, professor of education, Østfold University
In Critical Concepts for the Creative Humanities, van der Tuin and Verhoeff have created new and original conceptual pathways for exploring the multiple and complexly intertwining lines connecting theoretical and creative practice, and intellectual and sensory experience. This is a bold book, and its influence is bound to be transformative of current and future directions in the arts and humanities.
— D. N. Rodowick, Glen A. Lloyd Distinguished Service Professor in the College and Division of Humanities, The University of Chicago