This book brings Søren Kierkegaard's nineteenth-century existentialist project into our
contemporary age applying his understanding of freedom and despair to science and science
studies queer decolonial and critical race theory and disability studies. The book draws out
the materialist dimensions of belief examining the existential dynamics of phenomena like
placebos epigenetics pedagogy and scientific inquiry itself. Each chapter dramatizes the
ways in which abstractions like race or genes and even belief are sites of contested practices
with pressing political significance. Focusing on the existential dangers posed by neo-liberal
and finance capitalist systems the book brings to life the resources for resistance found
within science studies and critical approaches to race secularity and disability. Throughout
the book Kierkegaard becomes an ally with ecological and developmental evolutionary theorists
as well as with science studies critical race and crip theorists who foreground the
relational and impassioned nature of existence.
