UMass Amherst Libraries Presents New Open Textbook, ‘Radical Social Theory: An Appraisal, a Critique, and an Overcoming’

The UMass Amherst Libraries are pleased to announce the publication of a new open textbook, “Radical Social Theory: An Appraisal, a Critique, and an Overcoming.” The text was written by Graciela Monteagudo, professor and associate director of the Social Thought and Political Economy Program (STPEC), and Aaron McBryar ’18, lecturer Shemon Salam, Swati Birla ’06,’22Ph.D., Doug Hornstein ’18, Matthew Hewett ’20, Ashley Everson ’19, Manuel García ’18, Eli Bondar ’21, Arno Noack ’18, Alex Coats ’24, Chris Kennedy ’21, Artemis Duffy ’21, Ella Khorov ’20, Nellie Marshall-Torres ’21, Emily Parker ’20, Emily Van Regenmorter ’21, Leritza Ruiz ’21 and Lucia Solorzano ’20. 

The book was written thanks to support from the University Libraries Open Education Initiative, which is intended to help faculty transition to open educational resources (OER). OER are learning, teaching, and research materials in any format and medium that reside in the public domain or are under copyright that have been released under an open license and permit no-cost access, re-use, re-purpose, adaptation, and redistribution by others. OER are known to reduce the cost of textbooks and other course materials for students and improve upon their academic success.

“The open educational resources collected in this book were created and assembled through a joint effort by the students and faculty in the STPEC at UMass,” says Monteagudo. “STPEC students and faculty are interested in exploring the structural causes of poverty, the racial, sexual, and gender dimensions of capitalism, the role of gender and sex in productive and reproductive labor, and the connection between liberalism, colonialism, and racism. This text is the main resource for Introduction to Radical Social Theory, STPEC 189, a one hundred-level General Education course taken by over 200 students per year.”