New Books in Geography
498 episodes - English - Latest episode: 5 days ago - ★★★★ - 14 ratingsInterviews with Geographers about their New Books
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Episodes
Locusts of Power: Borders, Empire, and Environment in the Modern Middle East (Cambridge UP, 2023)
July 12, 2024 08:00 - 46 minutesLocusts of Power: Borders, Empire, and Environment in the Modern Middle East (Cambridge UP, 2023) focuses on the intersections of three entities otherwise deemed marginal in historical scholarship: the Jazira region, the borderlands of today’s Iraq, Syria, and Turkey; the mobile peoples within this region, from nomadic pastoralists to deportees and refugees; and locusts. Sam Dolbee’s research traces the movements of people and insects within this region, and how the social “problem” of mobile...
Eric Thompson, "The Story of Southeast Asia" (NUS Press, 2024)
July 11, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourDoes Southeast Asia “exist”? It’s a real question: Southeast Asia is a geographic region encompassing many different cultures, religions, political styles, historical experiences, and languages, economies. Can we think of this part of the world as one cohesive “place”? Eric Thompson, in his book The Story of Southeast Asia (NUS Press: 2024), suggests that we can, as he tells the region’s history from way back in prehistory, through its time as Buddhist and Hindu kingdoms, the introduction of ...
David Alff, "The Northeast Corridor: The Trains, the People, the History, the Region" (U Chicago Press, 2024)
July 09, 2024 08:00 - 46 minutesTraversed by thousands of trains and millions of riders, the Northeast Corridor might be America’s most famous railway, but its influence goes far beyond the right-of-way. Dr. David Alff welcomes readers aboard to see how nineteenth-century train tracks did more than connect Boston to Washington, DC. They transformed hundreds of miles of Atlantic shoreline into a political capital, a global financial hub, and home to fifty million people. The Northeast Corridor: The Trains, the People, the Hi...
Amanda McMillan Lequieu, "Who We Are Is Where We Are: Making Home in the American Rust Belt" (Columbia UP, 2024)
July 05, 2024 08:00 - 41 minutesHalf a century ago, deindustrialization gutted blue-collar jobs in the American Midwest. But today, these places are not ghost towns. People still call these communities home, even as they struggle with unemployment, poverty, and other social and economic crises. Why do people remain in declining areas through difficult circumstances? What do their choices tell us about rootedness in a time of flux? Through the cases of the former steel manufacturing hub of southeast Chicago and a shuttered m...
Samuel Dolbee, "Locusts of Power: Borders, Empire, and Environment in the Modern Middle East" (Cambridge UP, 2022)
July 03, 2024 08:00 - 55 minutesIn this episode, I talk to Samuel Dolbee, Assistant Professor of History at Vanderbilt University. His book, Locusts of Power: Borders, Empire, and Environment in the Modern Middle East (Cambridge University Press, 2023). In this highly original environmental history, Samuel Dolbee sheds new light on borders and state formation by following locusts and revealing how they shaped both the environment and people's imaginations from the late Ottoman Empire to the Second World War. Drawing on a wi...
John Soluri, "Creatures of Fashion: Animals, Global Markets, and the Transformation of Patagonia" (UNC Press, 2024)
July 03, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourToday, the mention of Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego conjures images of idyllic landscapes untouched by globalisation. Creatures of Fashion: Animals, Global Markets, and the Transformation of Patagonia (University of North Carolina Press, 2024) by Dr. John Soluri upends this, revealing how the exploitation of animals—terrestrial and marine, domesticated and wild, living and dead—was central to the region's transformation from Indigenous lands into the national territories of Argentina and Chi...
Meaghan Stiman, "Privileging Place: How Second Homeowners Transform Communities and Themselves" (Princeton UP, 2024)
July 01, 2024 08:00 - 30 minutesIn recent decades, Americans have purchased second homes at unprecedented rates. In Privileging Place: How Second Homeowners Transform Communities and Themselves (Princeton UP, 2024), Meaghan Stiman examines the experiences of predominantly upper-middle-class suburbanites who bought second homes in the city or the country. Drawing on interviews with more than sixty owners of second homes and ethnographic data collected over the course of two years in Rangeley, Maine, and Boston, Massachusetts...
Race, Social Reproduction, and Capitalist Totality
June 30, 2024 09:00 - 1 hourWe live in a historical conjuncture characterized by the rise of a range of social movements that aim to challenge different forms of domination: capitalism, patriarchy, racism, settler colonialism, just to name a few. However, critical scholars remain divided about how to think about the relations between these different struggles. The political stakes in these debates are enormous: attributing primacy to particular social processes or structures risks alienating constituencies that also exp...
Reeju Ray, "Placing the Frontier in British North-East India: Law, Custom, and Knowledge" (Oxford UP, 2023)
June 26, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourPlacing the Frontier in British North-East India: Law, Custom, and Knowledge (Oxford UP, 2023) is a study of the travels of colonial law into the North-East frontier of the British Empire in India. Focusing on the nineteenth century, it examines the relationship of law and space, and indigenous place-making. Inhabitants of the frontier hills examined in this book were not defined as British subjects, yet they were incorporated within the colonial legal framework. The work examines the nature ...
Paulina Rowinska, "Mapmatics: How We Navigate the World Through Numbers" (Pan Macmillan, 2024)
June 19, 2024 08:00 - 56 minutesHow does a delivery driver distribute hundreds of packages in a single working day? Why does remote Alaska have such a large airport? Where should we look for elusive serial killers? The answers lie in the crucial connection between maps and maths. In Mapmatics: How We Navigate the World Through Numbers (Pan Macmillan, 2024), Dr Paulina Rowinska embarks on a fascinating journey to discover the mathematical foundations of cartography and cartographical influences on mathematics. From a sixteen...
Adrienne Brown, "The Residential Is Racial: A Perceptual History of Mass Homeownership" (Stanford UP, 2024)
June 09, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourHousing experts and activists have long described the foundational role race has played in the creation of mass homeownership. This book insistently tracks the inverse: the role of mass homeownership in changing the definition, perception, and value of race. In The Residential Is Racial: A Perceptual History of Mass Homeownership (Stanford University Press, 2024) Dr. Adrienne Brown reveals how mass homeownership remade the rubrics of race, from the early cases realtors made for homeownership'...
Aaron Eddens, "Seeding Empire: American Philanthrocapital and the Roots of the Green Revolution in Africa" (U California Press, 2024)
June 06, 2024 08:00 - 53 minutesIn Seeding Empire: American Philanthrocapital and the Roots of the Green Revolution in Africa (University of California Press, 2024), Dr. Aaron Eddens rewrites an enduring story about the past—and future—of global agriculture. Dr. Eddens connects today's efforts to cultivate a "Green Revolution in Africa" to a history of American projects that introduced capitalist agriculture across the Global South. Expansive in scope, this book draws on archival records of the earliest Green Revolution pr...
Ronald R. Sundstrom, "Just Shelter: Gentrification, Integration, Race, and Reconstruction" (Oxford UP, 2024)
June 01, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourIt is widely acknowledged that the United States is in the grip of an enduring housing crisis. It is less frequently recognized that this crisis amounts to more than there being an insufficient supply of adequate shelter. It rather is tied to a range of other forms of social and economic vulnerability – and many of these forms of vulnerability impede a citizen’s capacity to function as a full member of society. What’s more, the familiar terms we deploy in discussing the housing crisis – gentr...
Polo B. Moji, "Gender and the Spatiality of Blackness in Contemporary AfroFrench Narratives" (Routledge, 2022)
May 31, 2024 08:00 - 55 minutesPolo B. Moji's book Gender and the Spatiality of Blackness in Contemporary AfroFrench Narratives (Routledge, 2022) approaches the study of AfroEurope through narrative forms produced in contemporary France, a location which richly illustrates race in European spaces. Moji adopts a transdisciplinary lens that combines critical black and urban geographies, intersectional feminism, and textual analysis to explore the spatial negotiations of black women in France. It assesses literature, film, an...
Constantin Ardeleanu, "Steamboat Modernity: Travel, Transport, and Social Transformation on the Lower Danube, 1830–1860" (CEU Press, 2024)
May 18, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourThrough a skillful combination of economic and cultural history, this book describes the impact on Moldavia and Wallachia of steam navigation on the Danube. The Danube route integrated the two principalities into a dense network of European roads and waterways. From the 1830s to the 1860s, steamboat transport transformed time and space for the areas that benefited from regular services. River traffic accelerated urban development along the Lower Danube and contributed directly to institutiona...
Miguel A. Martínez, "Research Handbook on Urban Sociology" (Edward Elgar, 2024)
May 17, 2024 08:00 - 54 minutesEmphasising the social, critical and situated dimensions of the urban, this comprehensive Research Handbook presents a unique collection of theoretical and empirical perspectives on urban sociology. Bringing together expert contributors from across the world, it provides a rich overview and research agenda for contemporary urban sociological scholarship. Chapters highlight the macro-historical context of the urban, and conduct a critical and reflexive review of mainstream theories and concept...
Per Högselius and Achim Klüppelberg, "The Soviet Nuclear Archipelago: A Historical Geography of Atomic-Powered Communism" (CEU Press, 2023)
May 12, 2024 08:00 - 23 minutesIn this episode of the CEU Press Podcast, host Andrea Talabér (CEU Press/CEU Review of Books) sat down with Per Högselius and Achim Klüppelberg to discuss their new book with CEU Press entitled, The Soviet Nuclear Archipelago: A Historical Geography of Atomic-Powered Communism (CEU Press, 2023). The book is available Open Access, click here to download. The war in Ukraine, with the exposure of nuclear power stations and the danger of atomic warfare, has made the legacy of the Soviet nuclear s...
Ketaki Chowkhani and Craig Wynne, "Singular Selves: An Introduction to Singles Studies" (Routledge, 2024)
May 04, 2024 08:00 - 38 minutesSingular Selves: An Introduction to Singles Studies (Routledge, 2024) edited By Ketaki Chowkhani and Craig Wynne examines, for perhaps the first time, singlehood at the intersections of race, media, language, culture, literature, space, health, and life satisfaction. It adopts an interdisciplinary approach, borrowing from sociology, literary studies, medical humanities, race studies, linguistics, demographic studies, and critical geography to understand singlehood in the world today. This col...
Harry Pettit, "The Labor of Hope:: Meritocracy and Precarity in Egypt" (Stanford UP, 2023)
May 02, 2024 08:00 - 56 minutesCapitalism is not only an economic system but also a system of production and allocation of hope. In Egypt, a generation of young men desire fulfilling employment, meaningful relationships, and secure family life, yet find few paths to achieve this. In The Labor of Hope:: Meritocracy and Precarity in Egypt (Stanford UP, 2023), Harry Pettit follows these educated but underemployed men as they struggle to establish careers and build satisfying lives. In so doing, this book reveals the lived co...
Hanne Elliot Fønss Nielsen, "Brand Antarctica: How Global Consumer Culture Shapes Our Perceptions of the Ice Continent" (U Nebraska Press, 2023)
May 01, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourAntarctica is, and has always been, very much “for sale.” Whales, seals, and ice have all been marketed as valuable commodities, but so have the stories of explorers. The modern media industry developed in parallel with land-based Antarctic exploration, and early expedition leaders needed publicity to generate support for their endeavours. Their lectures, narratives, photographs, and films were essentially advertisements for their adventures. At the same time, popular media began to use the n...
Juliet B. Wiersema, "The History of a Periphery: Spanish Colonial Cartography from Colombia's Pacific Lowlands" (U Texas Press, 2024)
April 26, 2024 08:00 - 56 minutesDuring the late Spanish colonial period, the Pacific Lowlands, also called the Greater Chocó, was famed for its rich placer deposits. Gold mined here was central to New Granada’s economy yet this Pacific frontier in today’s Colombia was considered the “periphery of the periphery.” Infamous for its fierce, unconquered Indigenous inhabitants and its brutal tropical climate, it was rarely visited by Spanish administrators, engineers, or topographers and seldom appeared in detail on printed maps ...
Philipp Demgenski, "Seeking a Future for the Past: Space, Power, and Heritage in a Chinese City" (U Michigan Press, 2024)
April 22, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourIn Seeking a Future for the Past: Space, Power, and Heritage in a Chinese City (U Michigan Press, 2024), Philipp Demgenski examines the complexities and changing sociopolitical dynamics of urban renewal in contemporary China. Drawing on ten years of ethnographic fieldwork in the northeastern Chinese city of Qingdao, the book tells the story of the slow, fragmented, and contentious transformation of Dabaodao - an area in the city’s former colonial center - from a place of common homes occupied...
Nicholas Terpstra, "Senses of Space in the Early Modern World" (Cambridge UP, 2024)
April 19, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourHow did early moderns experience sense and space? How did the expanding cultural, political, and social horizons of the period emerge out of those experiences and further shape them? Senses of Space in the Early Modern World (Cambridge University Press, 2024) by Dr. Nicholas Terpstra takes an approach that is both global expansive and locally rooted by focusing on four cities as key examples: Florence, Amsterdam, Boston, and Manila. They relate to distinct parts of European cultural and colon...
Annaliese Jacobs Claydon, "Arctic Circles and Imperial Knowledge: The Franklin Family, Indigenous Intermediaries, and the Politics of Truth" (Bloomsbury, 2024)
April 15, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourIn 1845 an expedition led by Sir John Franklin vanished in the Canadian Arctic. The enduring obsession with the Franklin mystery, and in particular Inuit information about its fate, is partly due to the ways in which information was circulated in these imperial spaces. Arctic Circles and Imperial Knowledge: The Franklin Family, Indigenous Intermediaries, and the Politics of Truth (Bloomsbury, 2024) by Dr. Annaliese Jacobs Claydon examines how the Franklins and other explorer families engaged ...
Grazia Ting Deng, "Chinese Espresso: Contested Race and Convivial Space in Contemporary Italy" (Princeton UP, 2024)
April 14, 2024 08:00 - 41 minutesWhy and how local coffee bars in Italy--those distinctively Italian social and cultural spaces--have been increasingly managed by Chinese baristas since the Great Recession of 2008? Italians regard espresso as a quintessentially Italian cultural product--so much so that Italy has applied to add Italian espresso to UNESCO's official list of intangible heritages of humanity. The coffee bar is a cornerstone of Italian urban life, with city residents sipping espresso at more than 100,000 of these...
Cristiana Strava, "Precarious Modernities: Assembling State, Space and Society on the Urban Margins in Morocco" (Bloomsbury, 2021)
April 12, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourWhat does living “precariously” mean in Casablanca? In 2014 it meant being labeled tcharmil (seeming to endanger public order) and swept up by the police, if you were an unemployed young man sporting a banda haircut and gathering with your mates on a street corner. Cristiana Strava witnessed this and other neglected aspects of urban vulnerability while conducting extensive fieldwork in Hay Mohammedi, a renowned working-class neighborhood on the margins of modern Morocco’s economic mecca, Casa...
Andres Rodriguez, "Frontier Fieldwork: Building a Nation in China's Borderlands, 1919-45" (U British Columbia Press, 2022)
April 06, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourIn 1911, as China was beset with challenges, a new generation of scholars considered a new problem: what to do with former imperial borders? How could China’s frontiers be considered part of the new nation? In Frontier Fieldwork: Building a Nation in China’s Borderlands 1919–45 (UBC Press, 2022), Andres Rodriguez looks at how students, travellers, social scientists, anthropologists, and missionaries contemplated these problems as they took to the Sino-Tibetan frontier to do fieldwork. Focusin...
Greg Jarrell, "Our Trespasses: White Churches and the Taking of American Neighborhoods" (Fortress Press, 2024)
April 03, 2024 08:00 - 49 minutesGreg Jarrell's book Our Trespasses: White Churches and the Taking of American Neighborhoods (Fortress Press, 2024) uncovers how race, geography, policy, and religion have created haunted landscapes in Charlotte, North Carolina, and throughout the United States. How do we value our lands, livelihoods, and communities? How does our theology inform our capacity--or lack thereof--for memory? What responsibilities do we bear toward those who have been harmed, not just by individuals but by our str...
Kris Butler, "Drink Maps in Victorian Britain" (Bodleian Library, 2024)
March 31, 2024 08:00 - 28 minutesWhat is a ‘drink map’? It may sound like a pub guide, yet it actually refers to a type of late nineteenth-century British map designed specifically to shock and shame people into drinking less. Drink Maps in Victorian Britain (Bodleian Library Publishing, 2024) by Kris Butler explores how drink maps of particular cities were published in an attempt to fight increasingly rampant alcohol consumption, from Liverpool, Manchester and Sheffield to Oxford, London and Norwich. Featuring red symbols t...
Matthew Schneider-Mayerson et al., "Empirical Ecocriticism: Environmental Narratives for Social Change" (U Minnesota Press, 2023)
March 23, 2024 08:00 - 48 minutesThere is a growing consensus that environmental narratives can help catalyze the social change necessary to address today's environmental crises; however, surprisingly little is known about their impact and effectiveness. In Empirical Ecocriticism, Matthew Schneider-Mayerson, Alexa Weik von Mossner, W. P. Malecki, and Frank Hakemulder combine an environmental humanities perspective with empirical methods derived from the social sciences to study the influence of environmental stories on our a...
Yolanda Ariadne Collins, "Forests of Refuge: Decolonizing Environmental Governance in the Amazonian Guiana Shield" (U California Press, 2024)
March 12, 2024 08:00 - 42 minutesForests of Refuge: Decolonizing Environmental Governance in the Amazonian Guiana Shield (U California Press, 2024) questions the effectiveness of market-based policies that govern forests in the interest of mitigating climate change. Yolanda Ariadne Collins interrogates the most ambitious global plan to incentivize people away from deforesting activities: the United Nations-endorsed Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+) initiative. Forests of Refuge explores RED...
Flora Lu and Emily Murai, "Critical Campus Sustainabilities: Bridging Social Justice and the Environment in Higher Education" (Springer, 2023)
March 11, 2024 08:00 - 52 minutesIn response to student demands reflecting the urgency of societal and ecological problems, universities are making a burgeoning effort to infuse environmental sustainability efforts with social justice. In this edited volume, we extend calls for higher education leaders to revamp programming, pedagogy, and research that problematically reproduce dominant techno-scientific and managerial conceptualizations of sustainability. Students, staff and community partners, especially those from histori...
Mara Albrecht and Alke Jenss, "The Spatiality and Temporality of Urban Violence: Histories, Rhythms and Ruptures" (Manchester UP, 2023)
March 10, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourThe Spatiality and Temporality of Urban Violence: Histories, Rhythms and Ruptures (Manchester UP, 2023) asks how the city, with its spatial and temporal configuration and its rhythms, produces and shapes violence, both in terms of the built environment, and through particular 'urban' social relations. The book builds on the insight that violence itself is a spatiotemporal practice with generative capacities, which produces and transforms urban space and time in the long turn, also through the...
Mike Duggan, "All Mapped Out: How Maps Shape Us" (Reaktion Books, 2024)
March 07, 2024 09:00 - 47 minutesMaps go far beyond just showing us where things are located. All Mapped Out: How Maps Shape Us (Reaktion, 2024) by Dr. Mike Duggan is an exploration of how maps impact our lives on social and cultural levels. This book takes readers on a journey through the fascinating history of maps, from ancient cave paintings and stone carvings to the digital interfaces we rely on today. But it’s not just about the maps themselves; it’s about the people behind them. Discover how maps have affected societi...
Sara J. Grossman, "Immeasurable Weather: Meteorological Data and Settler Colonialism from 1820 to Hurricane Sandy" (Duke UP, 2023)
February 28, 2024 09:00 - 41 minutesIn Immeasurable Weather: Meteorological Data and Settler Colonialism from 1820 to Hurricane Sandy (Duke UP, 2023), Sara J. Grossman explores how environmental data collection has been central to the larger project of settler colonialism in the United States. She draws on an extensive archive of historical and meteorological data spanning two centuries to show how American scientific institutions used information about the weather to establish and reinforce the foundations of a white patriarch...
Sarah Keyes, "American Burial Ground: A New History of the Overland Trail" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2023)
February 25, 2024 09:00 - 1 hourThe Overland Trail into the American West is one of the most culturally recognizable symbols of the American past: white covered wagons traversing the plains, filled with heroic pioneers embodying the nation's manifest destiny. In American Burial Ground: A New History of the Overland Trail (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2023), University of Nevada assistant professor of history Sarah Keyes rewrites that well-worn story. Keyes book focuses on a topic that was at the forefront of the minds ...
Isabella Alexander, "Copyright and Cartography: History, Law, and the Circulation of Geographical Knowledge" (Bloomsbury, 2023)
February 22, 2024 09:00 - 43 minutesIsabella Alexander's book Copyright and Cartography: History, Law, and the Circulation of Geographical Knowledge (Bloomsbury, 2023) explores the intertwined histories of mapmaking and copyright law in Britain from the early modern period up to World War 1, focusing chiefly on the 18th and 19th centuries. Taking a multidisciplinary approach and making extensive use of the archival record, this is the first detailed, historical account of the relationship between maps and copyright. As such, it...
Language Makes the Place
February 18, 2024 09:00 - 54 minutesIngrid Piller speaks with Adam Jaworski about his research in language and mobility. Adam is best known for his work on “linguascaping” – how languages, or bits of languages, are used to stylize a place. A welcome sign may index a tourist destination, artistic arrangements of word blocks like “love”, “peace”, or “joy” may index consumption and leisure spaces, multilingual signage may index a cosmopolitan space, and the absence of language may suggest the quiet luxury of the super-rich. As the...
Hamza Hamouchene and Katie Sandwell, "Dismantling Green Colonialism: Energy and Climate Justice in the Arab Region" (Pluto Press, 2023)
February 16, 2024 09:00 - 50 minutesJust in Time - the urgent need for a just transition in the Arab region. The newly published book Dismantling Green Colonialism: Energy and Climate justice in the Arab Region (Pluto Press, 2023) edited by Hamza Hamouchene and Katie Sandwell questions the development of sustainable energy production in the middle eastern and north African region. Positioning itself as part of a wider discussion of just transition, it provides wonderful insight into the colonial and capitalist narratives used t...
Jennifer Sdunzik, "The Geography of Hate: The Great Migration through Small-Town America" (U Illinois Press, 2023)
February 09, 2024 09:00 - 42 minutesDuring the Great Migration, Black Americans sought new lives in midwestern small towns only to confront the pervasive efforts of white residents determined to maintain their area’s preferred cultural and racial identity. Jennifer Sdunzik explores this widespread phenomenon by examining how it played out in one midwestern community. Sdunzik merges state and communal histories, interviews and analyses of population data, and spatial and ethnographic materials to create a rich public history tha...
Jake Berman, "The Lost Subways of North America: A Cartographic Guide to the Past, Present, and What Might Have Been" (U Chicago Press, 2023)
February 07, 2024 09:00 - 32 minutesEvery driver in North America shares one miserable, soul-sucking universal experience—being stuck in traffic. But things weren’t always like this. Why is it that the mass transit systems of most cities in the United States and Canada are now utterly inadequate? The Lost Subways of North America: A Cartographic Guide to the Past, Present, and What Might Have Been (University of Chicago Press, 2023) by Jake Berman offers a new way to consider this eternal question, with a strikingly visual—and ...
Youjin B. Chung, "Sweet Deal, Bitter Landscape: Gender Politics and Liminality in Tanzania's New Enclosures" (Cornell UP, 2024)
February 06, 2024 09:00 - 52 minutesDuring the “global land grab” of the early twenty-first century, legions of investors rushed to Africa to acquire land to produce and speculate on agricultural commodities. In Sweet Deal, Bitter Landscape: Gender Politics and Liminality in Tanzania's New Enclosures (Cornell UP, 2024), Youjin Chung examines the messy, indeterminate trajectory of a high-profile land deal signed by the Tanzanian government and a foreign investor: a 99-year lease to over 20,000 hectares of land in coastal Tanzani...
Damon Scott, "The City Aroused: Queer Places and Urban Redevelopment in Postwar San Francisco" (U Texas Press, 2024)
January 25, 2024 09:00 - 1 hourThe City Aroused: Queer Places and Urban Redevelopment in Postwar San Francisco (University of Texas Press, 2024) by Dr. Damon Scott is a lively history of urban development and its influence on queer political identity in postwar San Francisco. By reconstructing the planning and queer history of waterfront drinking establishments, Dr. Scott shows that urban renewal was a catalyst for community organising among racially diverse operators and patrons with far-reaching implications for the nati...
Jared D. Margulies, "The Cactus Hunters: Desire and Extinction in the Illicit Succulent Trade" (U Minnesota Press, 2023)
January 24, 2024 09:00 - 38 minutesCacti and succulents are phenomenally popular worldwide among plant enthusiasts, despite being among the world's most threatened species. The fervor driving the illegal trade in succulents might also be driving some species to extinction. Delving into the strange world of succulent collecting, Jared D. Margulies' book The Cactus Hunters: Desire and Extinction in the Illicit Succulent Trade (U Minnesota Press, 2023) takes us to the heart of this conundrum: the mystery of how and why ardent lov...
Pete Barbrook-Johnson and Alexandra S. Penn, "Systems Mapping: How to Build and Use Causal Models of Systems" (Palgrave MacMillan, 2022)
January 20, 2024 09:00 - 49 minutesThere is a growing need across social, environmental, and policy challenges for richer, more nuanced, yet actionable and participatory understanding of the world. Complexity science and systems thinking offer hope in meeting this need. But in their 2022 book Systems Mapping: How to Build and Use Causal Models of Systems (Palgrave MacMillan, 2022), Pete Barbrook-Johnson and Alexandra (Alex) S. Penn argue that ‘systems mapping’ is a necessary a starting point for understanding complex adaptive ...
Karen C. Pinto, "Medieval Islamic Maps: An Exploration" (U Chicago Press, 2016)
January 16, 2024 09:00 - 53 minutesThe history of Islamic mapping is one of the new frontiers in the history of cartography. Medieval Islamic Maps: An Exploration (University of Chicago Press, 2016) offers the first in-depth analysis of a distinct tradition of medieval Islamic maps known collectively as the Book of Roads and Kingdoms (Kitab al-Masalik wa al-Mamalik, or KMMS). Created from the mid-tenth through the nineteenth century, these maps offered Islamic rulers, scholars, and armchair explorers a view of the physical and...
Mark Monmonier, "Connections and Content: Reflections on Networks and the History of Cartography" (ESRI Press, 2019)
January 10, 2024 09:00 - 1 hourIn Connections and Content: Reflections on Networks and the History of Cartography (ESRI Press, 2019), cartographic cogitator Mark Monmonier shares his insights about the relationships between networks and maps through a collection of essays. Using historical maps, he explores: triangulation networks used to establish the baselines of a map’s scale; astronomical observations, ellipsoids, geodetic arcs, telegraph networks, and GPS constellations that establish latitude and longitude at control...
Gabriel Abend, "Words and Distinctions for the Common Good: Practical Reason in the Logic of Social Science" (Princeton UP, 2023)
January 02, 2024 09:00 - 29 minutesHow social scientists' disagreements about their key words and distinctions have been misconceived, and what to do about it Social scientists do research on a variety of topics--gender, capitalism, populism, and race and ethnicity, among others. They make descriptive and explanatory claims about empathy, intelligence, neoliberalism, and power. They advise policymakers on diversity, digitalization, work, and religion. And yet, as Gabriel Abend points out in Words and Distinctions for the Commo...
André Jansson, "Rethinking Communication Geographies: Geomedia, Digital Logistics and the Human Condition" (Edward Elgar, 2022)
December 23, 2023 09:00 - 28 minutesHow are geographies of communication changing with contemporary digital media and data infrastructure? What is ‘geomedia’ and ‘transmedia’? Where are the possibilities for human agency to emerge in the increasingly digitally mediated world? André Jansson, Professor at the Department of Geography, Media and Communication, Karlstad University, Sweden, introduces his latest book, Rethinking Communication Geographies: Geomedia, Digital Logistics and the Human Condition (Edward Elgar, 2022). In a ...
June Hee Kwon, "Borderland Dreams: The Transnational Lives of Korean Chinese Workers" (Duke UP, 2023)
December 18, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourMigration is a theme intertwined with hopes and dreams. In Borderland Dreams: The Transnational Lives of Korean Chinese Workers (Duke UP, 2023), June Hee Kwon explores the trajectory of the “Korean dream” that has fueled the massive migration of Korean Chinese workers from the Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture in northeast China to South Korea since the early 1990s. Charting the interplay of bodies, money, and time, the ethnography reveals how these migrant workers, in the course of pursui...