It is difficult to imagine making claims for human rights without using images. For better or worse, images of protest, evidence, and assertion are the lingua franca of struggles for justice today. The Flood of Rights examines the pathways through which these images and ideas circulate—routes that do not merely enable, but actually shape human-rights claims and their conceptual background.

Realism Materialism Art (RMA) introduces a diverse selection of new realist and materialist philosophies and examines their ramifications on the arts. Encompassing neo-materialist theories, object-oriented ontologies, and neo-rationalist philosophies, RMA serves as a primer on “speculative realism,” considering its conceptual innovations as spurs to artistic thinking and practice and beyond.

The Human Snapshot draws upon a 2011 conference of the same name. The conference contributions and subsequent essays examine contemporary forms of humanism and universalism as they circulate and are produced in art and photography. The look toward these two terms stems from theorist Ariella Azoulay’s research on the seminal exhibition “The Family of Man,” first installed at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1955.

In September 2011, Nikolaus Hirsch and Markus Miessen invited protagonists from the fields of architecture, art, philosophy, and literature to reflect on the single question of what, today, can be understood as a critical modality of spatial practice.

Class inevitably raises awkward questions for the protagonists of contemporary art—about their backgrounds, patrons, and ideological partialities. Lapdogs of the Bourgeoisie investigates this latent yet easily overlooked issue, which has been historically eclipsed by gender, sexuality, ethnicity, and nationality.

Internal Necessity was the topic of the Sommerakademie 2009, curated by Tirdad Zolghadr. The result is an independent reader that does not aim to merely document the academy 2009, but reflects and develops its topics in a rich diversity of visual and textual forms.