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
Tristan G. Brown, "Laws of the Land: Fengshui and the State in Qing Dynasty China" (Princeton UP, 2023)
December 11, 2023 09:00 - 57 minutesWelcome to another episode of New Books in Chinese Studies. I am your host, Julia Keblinska, and I am speaking today to Prof. Tristan Brown about his book, Laws of the Land: Fengshui and the State in Qing Dynasty China (Princeton UP, 2023). Brown’s book considers fengshui, that is, the knowledge of orienting structures, such as graves and houses, in accordance with well-established cosmological principles, as an administrative technology and language of power that was intrinsic to governance ...
Regina Lee Blaszczyk and David Suisman, "Capitalism and the Senses" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2023)
December 11, 2023 09:00 - 57 minutesRegina Lee Blaszczyk and David Suisman's Capitalism and the Senses (U Pennsylvania Press, 2023) is the first edited volume to explore how the forces of capitalism are entangled with everyday sensory experience. If the senses have a history, as Karl Marx wrote, then that history is inseparable from the development of capitalism, which has both taken advantage of the senses and influenced how sensory experience has changed over time. This pioneering collection shows how seeing, hearing, tasting...
Sahana Ghosh, "A Thousand Tiny Cuts: Mobility and Security Across the Bangladesh-India Borderlands" (U California Press, 2023)
December 10, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourDrawing on a decade of fieldwork in the borderlands of northern Bangladesh and eastern India, A Thousand Tiny Cuts: Mobility and Security Across the Bangladesh-India Borderlands (U California Press, 2023) chronicles the slow transformation of a connected region into national borderlands and shows the foundational place of gender and sexuality in the meaning and management of threat in relation to mobility. It recasts a singular focus on border fences and border crossings to show, instead, tha...
Stephen Legg, "Round Table Conference Geographies: Constituting Colonial India in Interwar London" (Cambridge UP, 2022)
December 10, 2023 09:00 - 51 minutesStephen Legg's Round Table Conference Geographies: Constituting Colonial India in Interwar London (Cambridge UP, 2022) explores a major international conference in 1930s London which determined India's constitutional future in the British Empire. Pre-dating the decolonising conferences of the 1950s–60s, the Round Table Conference laid the blueprint for India's future federal constitution. Despite this the conference is unanimously read as a failure, for not having comprehensively reconciled t...
Charlotte Al-Khalili, "Waiting for the Revolution to End: Syrian Displacement, Time and Subjectivity (UCL Press, 2023)
November 28, 2023 09:00 - 50 minutesWaiting for the Revolution to End: Syrian Displacement, Time and Subjectivity (UCL Press, 2023) by Dr. Charlotte Al-Khalili explores the Syrian revolution through the experiences of citizens in exile. Based on more than three years of embedded fieldwork with Syrians displaced in the border city of Gaziantep (southern Turkey), the book places the Syrian revolution and its tragic aftermath under ethnographic scrutiny. It charts the evolution from peaceful uprising (2011) to armed confrontation ...
Lydia Zvyagintseva and Mary Greenshields, "Land in Libraries: Toward a Materialist Conception of Education" (Library Juice Press, 2022)
November 23, 2023 09:00 - 38 minutesThe question of land is largely absent in libraries. Deeply committed to the neoliberal project as a guiding ideology of the profession, libraries exist at once as ahistorical, atheoretical, and landless institutions in their understanding of themselves, their work, and their impact on people. Land in Libraries: Toward a Materialist Conception of Education (Library Juice Press, 2023) seeks to contribute to the growing body of work on libraries and the anthropocene, decolonization, and climate...
Lidia Katia C. Manzo, "Gentrification and Diversity: Rebranding Milan's Chinatown" (Springer, 2023)
November 20, 2023 09:00 - 59 minutesLidia Katia C. Manzo's book Gentrification and Diversity: Rebranding Milan's Chinatown (Springer, 2023) examines lived experiences of making, inhabiting and appropriating space, in relation to the upscale commercial gentrification of the Milan Chinatown. It inquires about the significance of diverse neighborhoods as emerging multicultural spaces? Are we talking about neighborhood entrepreneurs providing services and entertainment to create local urban culture, or are we talking about politica...
Plantationocene
November 17, 2023 09:00 - 18 minutesIn this episode of High Theory, Neil Safier talks with us about the Plantationocene, a geological epoch that traces the effects of climate change to the historical systems of human and nonhuman environmental exploitation known as plantation agriculture. It is another name for the world we currently inhabit. In the episode, Neil describes how Donna Harraway and Anna Tsing invented the term Plantationocene in response to another recent term Anthropocene. Sources to check out include Donna Haraw...
Bahriye Kemal, "Writing Cyprus: Postcolonial and Partitioned Literatures of Place and Space" (Routledge, 2021)
November 16, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourBahriye Kemal's ground-breaking new work serves as the first study of the literatures of Cyprus from a postcolonial and partition perspective. Writing Cyprus: Postcolonial and Partitioned Literatures of Place and Space (Routledge, 2021) explores Anglophone, Hellenophone and Turkophone writings from the 1920s to the present. Drawing on Yi-Fu Tuan's humanistic geography and Henri Lefebvre's Marxist philosophy, Kemal proposes a new interdisciplinary spatial model, at once theoretical and empiric...
Shay Rabineau, "Walking the Land: A History of Israeli Hiking Trails" (Indiana UP, 2023)
November 12, 2023 09:00 - 59 minutesIsrael has one of the most extensive and highly developed hiking trail systems of any country in the world. Millions of hikers use the trails every year during holiday breaks, on mandatory school trips, and for recreational hikes. Shay Rabineau's Walking the Land: A History of Israeli Hiking Trails (Indiana UP, 2023) offers the first scholarly exploration of this unique trail system. Featuring more than ten thousand kilometers of trails, marked with hundreds of thousands of colored blazes, t...
Rory Coulter, "Housing and Life Course Dynamics: Changing Lives, Places and Inequalities" (Policy Press, 2023)
November 06, 2023 09:00 - 50 minutesDeepening inequalities and wider processes of demographic, economic, and social change are altering how people across the Global North move between homes and neighbourhoods over the lifespan. Housing and Life Course Dynamics: Changing Lives, Places, and Inequalities (Policy Press, 2023) presents a life course framework for understanding how the changing dynamics of people's family, education, employment, and health experiences are deeply intertwined with ongoing shifts in housing behaviour an...
Joseph Brady and Paul Ferguson, "Dublin: Mapping the City" (Birlinn, 2023)
October 31, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourMaps are essential tools in finding our way around, but they also tell stories and are great depositories of information. Until the twentieth century and the arrival of aerial images, a map was the best way of getting a sense of what a city looked like on the ground. Dublin: Mapping the City (Birlinn, 2023) by Dr. Joseph Brady and Paul Ferguson presents a carefully chosen selection of maps that traces the growth and development of Dublin from the early seventeenth century to the present day, ...
Chet Van Duzer, "Frames That Speak: Cartouches on Early Modern Maps" (Brill, 2023)
October 29, 2023 08:00 - 41 minutesFrames That Speak: Cartouches on Early Modern Maps (Brill, 2023) is the first systematic exploration of cartographic cartouches, the decorated frames that surround the title, or other text or imagery, on historic maps. It addresses the history of their development, the sources cartographers used in creating them, and the political, economic, historical, and philosophical messages their symbols convey. Cartouches are the most visually appealing parts of maps, and also spaces where the cartogra...
Özge Yaka, "Fighting for the River: Gender, Body, and Agency in Environmental Struggles" (U California Press, 2023)
October 23, 2023 08:00 - 54 minutesFighting for the River: Gender, Body, and Agency in Environmental Struggles (U California Press, 2023) portrays women's intimate, embodied relationships with river waters and explores how those relationships embolden local communities' resistance to private run-of-the-river hydroelectric power plants in Turkey. Building on extensive ethnographic research, Özge Yaka develops a body-centered, phenomenological approach to women's environmental activism and combines it with a relational ontologic...
Sonja K. Pieck, "Mnemonic Ecologies: Memory and Nature Conservation along the Former Iron Curtain" (MIT Press, 2023)
October 22, 2023 08:00 - 52 minutesThe first book-length scholarly treatment of Germany's largest conservation project, the Green Belt, Mnemonic Ecologies: Memory and Nature Conservation along the Former Iron Curtain (MIT Press, 2023) by Dr. Sonja Pieck presents a new interdisciplinary approach: that effective restoration and conservation of wounded land must merge ecology with memory. Since the Cold War's end in 1989, German conservationists have transformed the once-militarised border between East and West Germany into an ex...
Michael Welsh, "Big Bend National Park: Mexico, the United States, and a Borderland Ecosystem" (U Nevada Press, 2021)
October 22, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourNational Parks are sites where politics, cultures, and ecology converge. University of Northern Colorado historian Michael Welsh argues that, at Big Bend National Park in West Texas, a fourth dynamic is at play: diplomacy. In Big Bend National Park: Mexico, the United States, and a Borderland Ecosystem (U Nevada Press, 2021), Welsh tells the story of how this place - isolated even in its Indigenous history - came to be a site of diplomatic wrangling between the United States and Mexico. Situa...
Hyun Bang Shin et al., "COVID-19 in Southeast Asia: Insights for a Post-pandemic World" (Ubiquity Press, 2021)
October 15, 2023 08:00 - 32 minutesCOVID-19 in Southeast Asia: Insights for a Post-pandemic World (Ubiquity Press, 2021) brings together an ensemble of social scientists who offer critical reflections on how the pandemic was experienced in the region. It interrogates dominants narratives of Covid-19’s legacies and invites readers to reflect of what it means to return to ‘normal’ in contexts marked by inequalities, selective policy interventions, and invisibilised experiences of marginalised communities. The book is structured ...
James J. A. Blair, "Salvaging Empire: Sovereignty, Natural Resources, and Environmental Science in the South Atlantic" (Cornell UP, 2023)
October 13, 2023 08:00 - 46 minutesSalvaging Empire: Sovereignty, Natural Resources, and Environmental Science in the South Atlantic (Cornell University Press, 2023) by Dr. James J. A. Blair probes the historical roots and current predicaments of a twenty-first century settler colony seeking to control an uncertain future through resource management and environmental science. Four decades after a violent 1982 war between the United Kingdom and Argentina reestablished British authority over the Falkland Islands (Las Malvinas in...
Timur Warner Hammond, "Placing Islam: Geographies of Connection in Twentieth-Century Istanbul" (U California Press, 2023)
September 27, 2023 08:00 - 53 minutesFor centuries, the Mosque of Eyüp Sultan has been one of Istanbul’s most important pilgrimage destinations, in large part because of the figure buried in the tomb at its center: Halid bin Zeyd Ebû Eyûb el-Ensârî, a Companion of the Prophet Muhammad. In Placing Islam: Geographies of Connection in Twentieth-Century Istanbul (University of California Press, 2023), Timur Hammond argues here, however, that making a geography of Islam involves considerably more. Following practices of storytelling...
Jamie L. Jones, "Rendered Obsolete: Energy Culture and the Afterlife of US Whaling" (UNC Press, 2023)
September 26, 2023 08:00 - 48 minutesThrough the mid-nineteenth century, the US whaling industry helped drive industrialization and urbanization, providing whale oil to lubricate and illuminate the country. The Pennsylvania petroleum boom of the 1860s brought cheap and plentiful petroleum into the market, decimating whale oil's popularity. Here, from our modern age of fossil fuels, Jamie L. Jones uses literary and cultural history to show how the whaling industry held firm in US popular culture even as it slid into obsolescence....
Phaedra C. Pezzullo, "Beyond Straw Men: Plastic Pollution and Networked Cultures of Care" (U California Press, 2023)
September 22, 2023 08:00 - 23 minutesAddressing plastics can feel overwhelming. Guilt, shame, anger, hurt, fear, dismissiveness, and despair abound. Beyond Straw Men: Plastic Pollution and Networked Cultures of Care (U California Press, 2023) moves beyond "hot take" or strawman fallacies by illustrating how affective counterpublics mobilized around plastics reveal broader stories about environmental justice and social change. Inspired by on- and offline organizing, Pezzullo engages public controversies, policies, and headline-ma...
Stefan Helmreich, "A Book of Waves" (Duke UP, 2023)
September 16, 2023 08:00 - 46 minutesIn A Book of Waves (Duke UP, 2023), Stefan Helmreich examines ocean waves as forms of media that carry ecological, geopolitical, and climatological news about our planet. Drawing on ethnographic work with oceanographers and coastal engineers in the Netherlands, the United States, Australia, Japan, and Bangladesh, Helmreich details how scientists at sea and in the lab apprehend waves’ materiality through abstractions, seeking to capture in technical language these avatars of nature at once per...
Dženita Karić, "Bosnian Hajj Literature: Multiple Paths to the Holy" (Edinburgh UP, 2022)
September 15, 2023 08:00 - 59 minutesDženita Karić's new book Bosnian Hajj Literature: Multiple Paths to the Holy (Edinburgh University Press, 2023) maps the diverse understandings of the hajj in relation to Islamic geography by Bosnian Muslim authors who wrote in different genres from the 16th to the 21st centuries. The study captures how hajj was imagined and constructed in relation to Islamic cosmology, rituals, Sufi saints, and political and temporal realities, while remaining unchanged in other ways. The book generatively t...
A Better Way to Buy Books
September 12, 2023 08:00 - 34 minutesBookshop.org is an online book retailer that donates more than 80% of its profits to independent bookstores. Launched in 2020, Bookshop.org has already raised more than $27,000,000. In this interview, Andy Hunter, founder and CEO discusses his journey to creating one of the most revolutionary new organizations in the book world. Bookshop has found a way to retain the convenience of online book shopping while also supporting independent bookstores that are the backbones of many local communiti...
Race and Electrical Infrastructure in the Jim Crow South
September 11, 2023 08:00 - 53 minutesConor Harrison, Associate Professor of Geography and the School of Earth, Ocean, and Environment at the University of South Carolina, talks about his research into the racist development of electrical systems in the Jim Crow South with Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel. The pair discuss how Harrison’s research fits within larger trends in the academic discipline of geography and the kinds of empirical research Harrison did to support his articles on the racial dimensions of electricity infras...
Maxim Samson, "Invisible Lines: Boundaries and Belts That Define the World" (Profile Books, 2023)
September 10, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourOur world has innumerable boundaries, ranging from the obvious - like an ocean - to subtle differences in language or climate. Most of us cross invisible lines all the time, but don't stop to consider them. In Invisible Lines: Boundaries and Belts That Define the World (Profile, 2023), geographer Dr. Maxim Samson presents 30 such unseen boundaries, intriguing and unexpected examples of the myriad ways in which we collectively engage with and experience the world. From football fans in Buenos ...
Nicole Fabricant, "Fighting to Breathe: Race, Toxicity, and the Rise of Youth Activism in Baltimore" (U California Press, 2022)
September 10, 2023 08:00 - 36 minutesIndustrial toxic emissions on the South Baltimore Peninsula are among the highest in the nation. Because of the concentration of factories and other chemical industries in their neighborhoods, residents face elevated rates of lung cancer and other respiratory illnesses in addition to heart attacks, strokes, and cardiovascular disease, all of which can lead to premature death. Fighting to Breathe: Race, Toxicity, and the Rise of Youth Activism in Baltimore (U California Press, 2022) follows a...
Zdenka Sokolickova, "The Paradox of Svalbard: Climate Change and Globalisation in the Arctic" (Pluto Press, 2023)
September 09, 2023 08:00 - 49 minutesThe town of Longyearbyen in the high Arctic is the world's northernmost settlement. Here, climate change is happening fast. It is clearly seen and sensed by the locals; with higher temperatures, more rain and permafrost thaw. At the same time, the town is shifting from state-controlled coal production to tourism, research, and development, rapidly globalizing, with numerous languages spoken, cruise ships sounding the horn in the harbor, and planes landing and taking off. Zdenka Sokolíčková li...
Kathryn J. Edin et al., "The Injustice of Place: Uncovering the Legacy of Poverty in America" (Mariner Books, 2023)
September 01, 2023 08:00 - 33 minutesA sweeping and surprising new understanding of extreme poverty in America from the authors of the acclaimed $2.00 a Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America. Three of the nation’s top scholars – known for tackling key mysteries about poverty in America – turn their attention from the country’s poorest people to its poorest places. Based on a fresh, data-driven approach, they discover that America’s most disadvantaged communities are not the big cities that get the most notice. Instead, nearl...
Lucia Carminati. "Seeking Bread and Fortune in Port Said: Labor Migration and the Making of the Suez Canal, 1859-1906" (U California Press, 2023)
August 24, 2023 08:00 - 57 minutesLucia Carminati's book Seeking Bread and Fortune in Port Said: Labor Migration and the Making of the Suez Canal, 1859-1906 (U California Press, 2023) probes migrant labor's role in shaping the history of the Suez Canal and modern Egypt. It maps the everyday life of Port Said's residents between 1859, when the town was founded as the Suez Canal's northern harbor, and 1906, when a railway connected it to the rest of Egypt. Through groundbreaking research, Carminati provides a ground-level persp...
Corina Rodríguez Enríquez and Masaya Llavaneras Blanco, "Corporate Capture of Development: Public-Private Partnerships, Women’s Human Rights, and Global Resistance" (Bloomsbury, 2023)
August 23, 2023 08:00 - 35 minutesPublic-Private Partnerships (PPPs) have gained a renewed momentum in recent years, and have come to be viewed by governments and funders alike as a silver bullet for infrastructure development and public service provision. Critiques of the corporate capture of development are well established, yet until now the urgent question of the impacts of PPPs on women's human rights around the world has remained under-explored. Corina Rodríguez Enríquez and Masaya Llavaneras Blanco's book Corporate Ca...
Thomas Simpson, "The Frontier in British India: Space, Science, and Power in the Nineteenth Century" (Cambridge UP, 2021)
August 22, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourIn The Frontier in British India: Space, Science, and Power in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge UP, 2021), Thomas Simpson provides an innovative account of how distinctive forms of colonial power and knowledge developed at the territorial fringes of colonial India during the nineteenth century. Through critical interventions in a wide range of theoretical and historiographical fields, he speaks to historians of empire and science, anthropologists, and geographers alike. The Frontier in Briti...
Of Peninsulas and Archipelagos: The Landscape of Translation in Southeast Asia
August 11, 2023 08:00 - 34 minutesWhat does a map of Southeast Asia as a pegasus have to do with translation and Southeast Asia? How can we think of translation as anything other than a unidirectional practice of bringing meaning across languages? How can Southeast Asia challenge the way we think about translation? Phrae Chittiphalangsri and Vicente L. Rafael, the editors of the first edited volume on translation and Southeast Asia Of Archipelagos and Peninsulas unpack these questions that are raised in the book, along with ...
Cindy McCulligh, "Sewer of Progress: Corporations, Institutionalized Corruption, and the Struggle for the Santiago River" (MIT Press, 2023)
August 06, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourFor almost two decades, the citizens of Western Mexico have called for a cleanup of the Santiago River, a water source so polluted it emanates an overwhelming acidic stench. Toxic clouds of foam lift off the river in a strong wind. In Sewer of Progress: Corporations, Institutionalized Corruption, and the Struggle for the Santiago River (MIT Press, 2023), Cindy McCulligh examines why industrial dumping continues in the Santiago despite the corporate embrace of social responsibility and regulat...
Alejandro Portes and Ariel C. Armony, "Emerging Global Cities: Origin, Structure, and Significance" (Columbia UP, 2022)
August 05, 2023 08:00 - 59 minutesCertain cities—most famously New York, London, and Tokyo—have been identified as “global cities,” whose function in the world economy transcends national borders. Without the same fanfare, formerly peripheral and secondary cities have been growing in importance, emerging as global cities in their own right. The striking similarity of the skylines of Dubai, Miami, and Singapore is no coincidence: despite following different historical paths, all three have achieved newfound prominence through ...
Logistic Clusters: Delivering Value and Driving Growth
August 03, 2023 14:52 - 15 minutesWhy is Memphis home to hundreds of motor carrier terminals and distribution centers? Why does the tiny island-nation of Singapore handle a fifth of the world's maritime containers and half the world's annual supply of crude oil? Which jobs can replace lost manufacturing jobs in advanced economies? Some of the answers to these questions are rooted in the phenomenon of logistics clusters—geographically concentrated sets of logistics-related business activities. In Logistics Clusters, supply cha...
Omolade Adunbi, "Enclaves of Exception: Special Economic Zones and Extractive Practices in Nigeria" (Indiana UP, 2022)
July 31, 2023 08:00 - 41 minutesHow do we measure and truly grasp the sweeping social and environmental effects of an oil-based economy? Focusing on the special economic zones resulting from China's trading partnership with Nigeria, Enclaves of Exception: Special Economic Zones and Extractive Practices in Nigeria (Indiana UP, 2022) offers a new approach to exploring the relationship between oil and technologies of extraction and their interrelatedness to local livelihoods and environmental practices. In this groundbreaking...
Erica Abrams Locklear, "Appalachia on the Table: Representing Mountain Food and People" (U Georgia Press, 2023)
July 28, 2023 08:00 - 54 minutesWhen her mother passed along a cookbook made and assembled by her grandmother, Erica Abrams Locklear thought she knew what to expect. But rather than finding a homemade cookbook full of apple stack cake, leather britches, pickled watermelon, or other “traditional” mountain recipes, Locklear discovered recipes for devil’s food cake with coconut icing, grape catsup, and fig pickles. Some recipes even relied on food products like Bisquick, Swans Down flour, and Calumet baking powder. Where, Lock...
Miya Qiong Xie, "Territorializing Manchuria: The Transnational Frontier and Literatures of East Asia" (Harvard UP, 2023)
July 28, 2023 08:00 - 57 minutesXiao Hong, Yom Sang-sop, Abe Kobo, and Zhong Lihe—these iconic literary figures from China, Korea, Japan, and Taiwan all described Manchuria extensively in their literary works. Now China’s Northeast—but a contested frontier in the first half of the twentieth century—Manchuria has inspired writers from all over East Asia to claim it as their own, employing novel themes and forms for engaging nation and empire in modern literature. Many of these works have been canonized as quintessential exam...
António Tomás, "In the Skin of the City: Spatial Transformation in Luanda" (Duke UP, 2022)
July 19, 2023 08:00 - 42 minutesIn his book, In the Skin of the City: Spatial Transformation in Luanda (Duke UP, 2022), António Tomás traces the history and transformation of Luanda, Angola, the nation’s capital as well as one of the oldest settlements founded by the European colonial powers in the Southern Hemisphere. Drawing on ethnographic and archival research alongside his own experiences growing up in Luanda, Tomás shows how the city’s physical and social boundaries—its skin—constitute porous and shifting interfaces b...
Anne Giblin Gedacht, "Tōhoku Unbounded: Regional Identity and the Mobile Subject in Prewar Japan" (Brill, 2022)
July 11, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourAnne Giblin Gedacht’s Tōhoku Unbounded: Regional Identity and the Mobile Subject in Prewar Japan (Brill, 2022) centers cross-border mobility in its narrative of the history of Japan’s Tōhoku region in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The book is a challenge to the stereotypical image of the Northeast as static and isolated. Focusing on Pacific migration―to Asia, North America, and the Philippines―Gedacht pieces together an account of how mobility and movement were instrument...
Linda J. Seligmann, "Quinoa: Food Politics and Agrarian Life in the Andean Highlands" (U Illinois Press, 2022)
July 08, 2023 08:00 - 44 minutesQuinoa's new status as a superfood has altered the economic fortunes of Quechua farmers in the Andean highlands. Linda J. Seligmann journeys to the Huanoquite region of Peru to track the mixed blessings brought about by the surging worldwide popularity of this "exquisite grain." Focusing on how Indigenous communities have confronted globalization, Seligmann examines the influence of food politics, development initiatives, and the region's agrarian history on present-day quinoa production amon...
Marco Caboara, "Regnum Chinae: The Printed Western Maps of China to 1735" (Brill, 2022)
July 06, 2023 08:00 - 42 minutesRegnum Chinae: The Printed Western Maps of China to 1735 (Brill, 2022) does something that no one has ever done before: collect just about every Western printed map of China, from 1584 up until Jean-Baptiste d’Anville’s landmark map in 1735. Marco Caboara, along with his fellow researchers, worked tirelessly to catalog and track down these many different documents, and tells the stories behind each one: “stories marked by scholarly breakthroughs, obsession, missionary zeal, commercial sagacit...
James Zarsadiaz, "Resisting Change in Suburbia: Asian Immigrants and Frontier Nostalgia in L.A." (U California Press, 2022)
June 27, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourIn this episode, we discuss how myths of suburbia, the American West, and the American Dream informed regional planning, suburban design, and ideas about race and belonging in California’s East San Gabriel Valley as found in James Zarsadiaz’s debut monograph Resisting Change in Suburbia: Asian Immigrants and Frontier Nostalgia in L.A. Published by the University of California Press in October 2022, Resisting Change in Suburbia recently won the Organization of American Historians' Lawrence W. ...
Erik Kojola, "Mining the Heartland: Nature, Place, and Populism on the Iron Range" (NYU Press, 2023)
June 23, 2023 08:00 - 31 minutesOn an unseasonably warm October afternoon in Saint Paul, hundreds of people gathered to protest the construction of a proposed copper-nickel mine in the rural northern part of their state. The crowd eagerly listened to speeches on how the project would bring long-term risks and potentially pollute the drinking water for current and future generations. A year later, another proposed mining project became the subject of a public hearing in a small town near the proposed site. But this time, loc...
James Hannam, "The Globe: How the Earth Became Round" (Reaktion Books, 2023)
June 22, 2023 08:00 - 47 minutesIn The Globe: How the Earth Became Round (Reaktion, 2023), Dr. James Hannam presents a history of how we came to know that the earth is round, rather than flat. The Globe tells the story of humanity's quest to discover the form of the world. Philosophers in ancient Greece deduced the true shape of the Earth in the fourth century BCE; the Romans passed the knowledge to India, and from there it spread to Baghdad and Central Asia. In early medieval Europe, Christians debated the matter but long ...
Gabriel Schwake, "Dwelling on the Green Line" (Cambridge UP, 2022)
June 17, 2023 08:00 - 51 minutesToday I talked to Gabriel Schwake about his book Dwelling on the Green Line (Cambridge UP, 2022). Concealed within the walls of settlements along the Green-Line, the border between Israel and the occupied West-Bank, is a complex history of territoriality, privatisation and multifaceted class dynamics. Since the late 1970s, the state aimed to expand the heavily populated coastal area eastwards into the occupied Palestinian territories, granting favoured groups of individuals, developers and en...
Vicky Johnson-Dahl, "Buffalo in 50 Maps" (Belt, 2023)
June 17, 2023 08:00 - 39 minutesThe third entry in Belt's urban cartography series, Buffalo in 50 Maps (2023) offers a truly unique view of the City of Good Neighbors, from the East Side to Millionaires' Row to Cazenovia Park. The best maps give you a feeling for what a place is really like, and Buffalo in 50 Maps offers a brand-new look at both the past and present of the Queen City of the Great Lakes. Through its colorful maps and insightful commentary, you'll discover the history of the city's changing boundaries, its nu...
Ida Yoshinaga et al., "Uneven Futures: Strategies for Community Survival from Speculative Fiction" (MIT Press, 2022)
June 11, 2023 08:00 - 54 minutesEssays on speculative/science fiction explore the futures that feed our most cherished fantasies and terrifying nightmares, while helping diverse communities devise new survival strategies for a tough millennium. The explosion in speculative/science fiction (SF) across different media from the late twentieth century to the present has compelled those in the field of SF studies to rethink the community’s identity, orientation, and stakes. In Ida Yoshinaga, Sean Guynes, and Gerry Canavan's edi...
Michael T. Friedman, "Mallparks: Baseball Stadiums and the Culture of Consumption" (Cornell UP, 2023)
June 07, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourIn Mallparks: Baseball Stadiums and the Culture of Consumption (Cornell UP, 2023), Michael T. Friedman observes that as cathedrals represented power relations in medieval towns and skyscrapers epitomized those within industrial cities, sports stadiums exemplify urban American consumption at the turn of the twenty-first century. Grounded in Henri Lefebvre and George Ritzer's spatial theories in their analyses of consumption spaces, Mallparks examines how the designers of this generation of bas...