New Books in Geography
498 episodes - English - Latest episode: 5 days ago - ★★★★ - 14 ratingsInterviews with Geographers about their New Books
Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/geography
Homepage Apple Podcasts Google Podcasts Overcast Castro Pocket Casts RSS feed
Episodes
Rob Marchant, "East Africa’s Human Environment Interactions: Historical Perspectives for a Sustainable Future" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022)
June 06, 2023 08:00 - 58 minutesEast Africa’s Human Environment Interactions: Historical Perspectives for a Sustainable Future (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022) is an ambitious integration of ecological, archaeological, anthropological land use sciences, drawing on human geography, demography and economics of development across the East Africa region. It focuses on understanding and unpicking the interactions that have taken place between the natural and unnatural history of the East African region and trace this interaction from ...
J. T. Roane, "Dark Agoras: Insurgent Black Social Life and the Politics of Place" (NYU Press, 2023)
June 04, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourIn Dark Agoras: Insurgent Black Social Life and the Politics of Place (NYU Press, 2023), author J. T. Roane shows how working-class Black communities cultivated two interdependent modes of insurgent assembly--dark agoras--in twentieth century Philadelphia. He investigates the ways they transposed rural imaginaries about and practices of place as part of their spatial resistances and efforts to contour industrial neighborhoods. In acts that ranged from the mundane acts of refashioning intimate...
Burkhard Schnepel and Julia Verne, "Cargoes in Motion: Materiality and Connectivity across the Indian Ocean" (Ohio UP, 2022)
May 27, 2023 08:00 - 44 minutesCargoes in Motion: Materiality and Connectivity across the Indian Ocean (Ohio University Press, 2022) is an innovative collection of essays that foregrounds specific cargoes as a means to understand connectivity and mobility across the Indian Ocean world. Scholars have long appreciated the centrality of trade and commerce in understanding the connectivity and mobility that underpin human experience in the Indian Ocean region. But studies of merchant and commercial activities have paid little ...
Naoíse Mac Sweeney, "The West: A New History of an Old Idea" (Dutton, 2023)
May 27, 2023 08:00 - 42 minutesDr. Naoíse Mac Sweeney presents a radical new account of how the idea of the West has shaped our history, told through the stories of fourteen fascinating lives in her book The West: A New History of an Old Idea (Dutton, 2023). We tend to imagine Western Civilisation as a golden thread, leading through the centuries from classical antiquity to the countries of the modern West - a cultural genealogy that connects Plato to NATO. It is an idea often invoked in the speeches of politicians and the...
Cat Button and Gerald Taylor Aiken, "Over Researched Places: Towards a Critical and Reflexive Approach" (Routledge, 2022)
May 24, 2023 08:00 - 33 minutesCat Button and Gerald Taylor Aiken's Over Researched Places: Towards a Critical and Reflexive Approach (Routledge, 2022) explores the implications that research-density has on the people and places researched, on the researchers, on the data collected and knowledge produced, and on the theories that are developed. It examines the effects that research-density has on the people and places researched, on the researchers, on the data collected and knowledge produced, and on the theories that are...
James Zarsadiaz, "Resisting Change in Suburbia: Asian Immigrants and Frontier Nostalgia in L.A." (U California Press, 2022)
May 23, 2023 08:00 - 58 minutesThe myth of the frontier West found its home in America's late twentieth century suburbs, argues University of San Francisco associate professor James Zarsadiaz in Resisting Change in Suburbia: Asian Immigrants and Frontier Nostalgia in L.A. (U California Press, 2022). In the East San Gabriel Valley, that myth meant protecting the suburban concept of "country living" from specific types of development, including increased traffic density and Asian cultural influences. Yet, by the late 1990s, ...
Christina Gerhardt, "Sea Change: An Atlas of Islands in a Rising Ocean" (U California Press, 2023)
May 23, 2023 08:00 - 48 minutesAtlases are being redrawn as islands are disappearing. What does an island see when the sea rises? Sea Change: An Atlas of Islands in a Rising Ocean (U California Press, 2023) weaves together essays, maps, art, and poetry to show us—and make us see—island nations in a warming world. Low-lying islands are least responsible for global warming, but they are suffering the brunt of it. This transportive atlas reorients our vantage point to place islands at the center of the story, highlighting Ind...
Natalie Koch, "Arid Empire: The Entangled Fates of Arizona and Arabia" (Verso, 2023)
May 22, 2023 08:00 - 59 minutesThe iconic deserts of the American southwest could not have been colonized and settled without the help of desert experts from the Middle East. For example: In 1856, a caravan of thirty-three camels arrived in Indianola, Texas, led by a Syrian cameleer the Americans called "Hi Jolly." This "camel corps," the US government hoped, could help the army secure the new southwest swath of the country just wrested from Mexico. Though the dream of the camel corps - and sadly, the camels - died, the id...
The 10,000 Year Build-Up to Brexit: A Conversation with Ian Morris
May 21, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourHow did Britain become a global superpower? Historian and classicist Ian Morris thinks geography has a lot to do with it. Prof. Morris discusses his latest book, Geography is Destiny: Britain and the World: A 10,000 Year History, which traces the long history of Britain's complex relationship with the European continent. He draws surprising parallels between characters ranging from the Roman Britons and Nigel Farage, to the Papacy and the European Union. Prof. Ian Morris is the Jean and Rebec...
Rob Verchick, "The Octopus in the Parking Garage: A Call for Climate Resilience" (Columbia UP, 2023)
May 19, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourOne morning in Miami Beach, an unexpected guest showed up in a luxury condominium complex’s parking garage: an octopus. The image quickly went viral. But the octopus―and the combination of infrastructure quirks and climate impacts that left it stranded―is more than a funny meme. It’s a potent symbol of the disruptions that a changing climate has already brought to our doorsteps and the ways we will have to adjust. His well-research and multi-faceted book, The Octopus in the Parking Garage: A ...
Cristina-Ioana Dragomir, "Power on the Move: Adivasi and Roma Accessing Social Justice" (Bloomsbury, 2022)
May 12, 2023 08:00 - 57 minutesThroughout centuries of persecution and marginalization, the Roma and Adivasi have been viewed as both victims and fighters, as royals and paupers, beasts and gods, and lately have been challenging the political and social order by defying the status quo. In Power on the Move: Adivasi and Roma Accessing Social Justice (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2022), author Cristina-Ioana Dragomir traces the struggle for social justice in Roma and Adivasi communities based on intensive ethnographic work in Roma...
Laurie Parsons, "Carbon Colonialism: How Rich Countries Export Climate Breakdown" (Manchester UP, 2023)
May 10, 2023 08:00 - 44 minutesClimate change is devastating the planet, and globalisation is hiding it. Laurie Parsons's book Carbon Colonialism: How Rich Countries Export Climate Breakdown (Manchester UP, 2023) opens our eyes. Around the world, leading economies are announcing significant progress on climate change. World leaders are queuing up to proclaim their commitment to tackling the climate crisis, pointing to data that shows the progress they have made. Yet the atmosphere is still warming at a record rate, with d...
Jack Parlett, "Fire Island" (Hanover Square Press, 2022)
May 07, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourA groundbreaking account of New York's Fire Island, chronicling its influence on art, literature, culture and queer liberation over the past century Fire Island, a thin strip of beach off the Long Island coast, has long been a vital space in the queer history of America. Both utopian and exclusionary, healing and destructive, the island is a locus of contradictions, all of which coalesce against a stunning ocean backdrop. Now, poet and scholar Jack Parlett tells the story of this iconic desti...
Anne Marie Todd, "Valley of Heart's Delight: Environment and Sense of Place in the Santa Clara Valley" (U California Press, 2022)
May 02, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourThis agricultural history explores the transformation of the Santa Clara Valley over the past one hundred years from America's largest fruit-producing region into the technology capital of the world. In the latter half of the twentieth century, the region's focus shifted from fruits--such as apricots and prunes--to computers. Both personal and public rhetoric reveals how a sense of place emerges and changes in an evolving agricultural community like the Santa Clara Valley. In Valley of Heart...
Spatial Computing
May 01, 2023 13:48 - 32 minutesShashi Shekhar and Pamela Vold, authors of Spatial Computing, from The MIT Press Essential Knowledge series, discuss the reach, risks and importance of spatial computing in confronting COVID-19. An accessible guide to the ideas and technologies underlying such applications as GPS, Google Maps, Pokémon Go, ride-sharing, driverless cars, and drone surveillance. Billions of people around the globe use various applications of spatial computing daily--by using a ride-sharing app, GPS, the e911 sy...
Mitul Baruah, "Slow Disaster: Political Ecology of Hazards and Everyday Life in the Brahmaputra Valley, Assam" (Routledge, 2022)
April 22, 2023 08:00 - 49 minutesMitul Baruah's Slow Disaster: Political Ecology of Hazards and Everyday Life in the Brahmaputra Valley, Assam (Routledge, 2022) presents a fascinating, ethnographic account of the challenges faced by communities living in Majuli, India, one of the largest river islands in the world, which has experienced immense socio-environmental transformations over the years, processes that are emblematic of the Brahmaputra Valley as a whole. Written in an engaging style, full of the author's insider pers...
Thomas Aiello, "Practical Radicalism and the Great Migration: The Cultural Geography of the Scott Newspaper Syndicate" (U Georgia Press, 2023)
April 22, 2023 08:00 - 36 minutesIn this episode, Thomas Aiello joins E. James West to discuss Practical Radicalism and the Great Migration: The Cultural Geography of the Scott Newspaper Syndicate (University of Georgia Press, 2023). Building on his earlier book The Grapevine of the Black South, which focused on the rise and fall of the Scott Newspaper Syndicate through its flagship publication the Atlanta Daily World, this book further reshapes the place of southern newspapers in the historiography of Black journalism. Pra...
Joel E. Correia, "Disrupting the Patrón: Indigenous Land Rights and the Fight for Environmental Justice in Paraguay's Chaco" (U California Press, 2023)
April 20, 2023 04:00 - 55 minutesThe Paraguayan Chaco is a settler frontier where cattle ranching and agrarian extractivism drive some of the world's fastest deforestation and most extreme land tenure inequality. Disrupting the Patrón: Indigenous Land Rights and the Fight for Environmental Justice in Paraguay's Chaco (U California Press, 2023) shows that environmental racism cannot be reduced to effects of neoliberalism but stems from long-standing social-spatial relations of power rooted in settler colonialism. Historically...
A. J. Faas, "In the Shadow of Tungurahua: Disaster Politics in Highland Ecuador" (Rutgers UP, 2023)
April 18, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourIn the Shadow of Tungurahua: Disaster Politics in Highland Ecuador (Rutgers University Press, 2023) relates the stories of the people of Penipe, Ecuador living in and between several villages around the volcano Tungurahua and two resettlement communities built for people displaced by government operations following volcanic eruptions in 1999 and 2006. The stories take shape in ways that influence prevailing ideas about how disasters are produced and reproduced, in this case by shifting assemb...
Kirstin Munro, "The Production of Everyday Life in Eco-Conscious Households" (Bristol UP, 2023)
April 12, 2023 08:00 - 48 minutesBased on qualitative interviews with sustainability-oriented parents of young children, Kirstin Munro's book The Production of Everyday Life in Eco-Conscious Households (Bristol UP, 2023) describes what happens when people make interventions into mundane and easy-to-overlook aspects of everyday life to bring the way they get things done into alignment with their environmental values. Because the ability to make changes is constrained by their culture and capitalist society, there are negative...
Marie-Luise Theuerkauf, "Dindshenchas Érenn" (U College Cork, 2022)
March 29, 2023 08:00 - 52 minutesThe purpose of the present volume, Dindshenchas Érenn (U College Cork, 2022), is to provide an accessible overview and entry into the complex literary creation known as Dindshenchas Érenn ‘History of the Notable Places of Ireland’. The five chapters in the book consider different aspects of the Dindshenchas corpus, ranging from the manuscript sources; the format and structure of the various texts so labelled; an overview of the scholarship published to date; the dating of the corpus; the Dind...
Gediminas Lesutis, "The Politics of Precarity: Spaces of Extractivism, Violence, and Suffering" (Routledge, 2021)
March 21, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourBased on critical theory and ethnographic research, Gediminas Lesutis' book The Politics of Precarity: Spaces of Extractivism, Violence, and Suffering (Routledge, 2021) explores how intensifying geographies of extractive capitalism shape human lives and transformative politics in marginal areas of the global economy. Engaging the work of Judith Butler, Henri Lefebvre, and Jacques Rancière with ethnographic research on social and political effects of mining-induced dispossession in Mozambique,...
Alvin Hall, "Driving the Green Book: A Road Trip Through the Living History of Black Resistance" (HarperOne, 2023)
March 21, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourFor countless Americans, the open road has long been a place where dangers lurk. In the era of Jim Crow, Black travelers encountered locked doors, hostile police, and potentially violent encounters almost everywhere, in both the South and the North. From 1936 to 1967, millions relied on The Negro Motorist Green Book, the definitive guide to businesses where they could safely rest, eat, or sleep. Most Americans only know of the guide from the 2018 Green Book movie or the 2020 Lovecraft Country...
Felicity Hwee-Hwa Chan, "Tensions in Diversity: Spaces for Collective Life in Los Angeles" (U Toronto Press, 2022)
March 18, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourUrban landscapes are complex spaces of sociocultural diversity, characterized by narratives of both conviviality and conflict. As people with multiple ethnicities and nationalities find their common destinies in thriving globalizing cities, social cohesiveness becomes more precarious as different beliefs, practices, ambitions, values, and affiliations intersect in close proximity, producing social tensions. Felicity Hwee-Hwa Chan's Tensions in Diversity: Spaces for Collective Life in Los Ang...
Ian Rowen, "One China, Many Taiwans: The Geopolitics of Cross-Strait Tourism" (Cornell UP, 2023)
March 17, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourOne China, Many Taiwans: The Geopolitics of Cross-Strait Tourism (Cornell UP, 2023) shows how tourism performs and transforms territory. In 2008, as the People’s Republic of China pointed over a thousand missiles across the Taiwan Strait, it sent millions of tourists in the same direction with the encouragement of Taiwan’s politicians and businesspeople. Contrary to the PRC’s efforts to use tourism to incorporate Taiwan into an imaginary “One China,” tourism aggravated tensions between the tw...
Sango Mahanty, "Unsettled Frontiers: Market Formation in the Cambodia-Vietnam Borderlands" (Cornell UP, 2022)
March 15, 2023 08:00 - 43 minutesLike other global frontiers, the Cambodia-Vietnam borderlands are a hotspot for migration, land claims, and markets for newly introduced commodities. These topics and more are the focus of Sango Mahanty’s recent book, Unsettled Frontiers: Market Formation in the Cambodia-Vietnam Borderlands (Cornell University Press, 2022). The book argues that frontier agricultural markets emerge from diverse commodity networks that constitute a dynamic and disruptive market ‘rhizome.’ In this podcast, Sango...
Nomadic Pastoralism Among the Mongol Herders
March 14, 2023 08:00 - 50 minutesNomadic Pastoralism among the Mongol Herders: Multispecies and Spatial Ethnography in Mongolia and Transbaikalia (Amsterdam University Press, 2021) is based on anthropological research Charlotte Marchina carried out between 2008 and 2016 to investigate the spatial features of nomadic pastoralism among the Mongol herders of Mongolia and Southern Siberia. In addition to classical survey methods, Charlotte used GPS tracking to analyze the ways in which pastoralists envision and concretely occupy...
The Future of the Silk Road: A Discussion with Tim Winters
March 07, 2023 09:00 - 38 minutesThe term "Silk Road" evokes images of trade and exotic luxurious goods and Orientalist images. Today, however, it also is associated with the projection of Chinese power abroad. And as that pairing suggests, the term "Silk Road" in fact has many meanings as Professor Tim Winter has been explaining in his book The Silk Road: Connecting Histories and Futures (Oxford University Press, 2022). Listen to him in conversation with Owen Bennett-Jones. Owen Bennett-Jones is a freelance journalist and w...
Jovan Scott Lewis, "Violent Utopia: Dispossession and Black Restoration in Tulsa" (Duke UP, 2022)
March 05, 2023 09:00 - 55 minutesIn Violent Utopia: Dispossession and Black Restoration in Tulsa (Duke UP, 2022), Jovan Scott Lewis retells the history and afterlife of the 1921 Tulsa race massacre, from the post-Reconstruction migration of Black people to Oklahoma Indian Territory to contemporary efforts to rebuild Black prosperity. He focuses on how the massacre in Tulsa’s Greenwood neighborhood—colloquially known as Black Wall Street—curtailed the freedom built there. Rather than framing the massacre as a one-off event, L...
Ronald L. Trosper, "Indigenous Economics: Sustaining Peoples and Their Lands" (U Arizona Press, 2022)
March 01, 2023 09:00 - 49 minutesWhat does “development” mean for Indigenous peoples? Indigenous Economics: Sustaining Peoples and Their Lands (U Arizona Press, 2022) lays out an alternative path showing that conscious attention to relationships among humans and the natural world creates flourishing social-ecological economies. Economist Ronald L. Trosper draws on examples from North and South America, Aotearoa/New Zealand, and Australia to argue that Indigenous worldviews centering care and good relationships provide criti...
Matthew S. Henry, "Hydronarratives: Water, Environmental Justice, and a Just Transition" (U Nebraska Press, 2023)
February 15, 2023 09:00 - 55 minutesThe story of water in the United States is one of ecosystemic disruption and social injustice. From the Standing Rock Indian Reservation and Flint, Michigan, to the Appalachian coal and gas fields and the Gulf Coast, low-income communities, Indigenous communities, and communities of color face the disproportionate effects of floods, droughts, sea level rise, and water contamination. In Hydronarratives: Water, Environmental Justice, and a Just Transition (U Nebraska Press, 2023) Matthew S. He...
Malcolm Harris, "Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World" (Little, Brown, 2023)
February 14, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourPalo Alto is nice. The weather is temperate, the people are educated, rich, healthy, enterprising. Remnants of a hippie counterculture have synthesized with high technology and big finance to produce the spiritually and materially ambitious heart of Silicon Valley, whose products are changing how we do everything from driving around to eating food. It is also a haunted toxic waste dump built on stolen Indian burial grounds, and an integral part of the capitalist world system. In Palo Alto: A...
Piro Rexhepi, "White Enclosures: Racial Capitalism and Coloniality Along the Balkan Route" (Duke UP, 2022)
February 12, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourIn White Enclosures: Racial Capitalism and Coloniality Along the Balkan Route (Duke UP, 2022), Piro Rexhepi explores the overlapping postsocialist and postcolonial border regimes in the Balkans that are designed to protect whiteness and exclude Muslim, Roma, and migrant communities. Rather than focusing on present crises to the exclusion of the histories that have gotten us to this point, Rexhepi takes a wide lens to understand how different mechanisms and regimes of exclusion are historicall...
Nilakantan RS, "South vs. North: India's Great Divide" (Juggernaut, 2023)
February 11, 2023 09:00 - 37 minutesCompare two children – one born in north India, the other in the south. The child from south India is far less likely to die in the first year of her life or lose her mother during childbirth.She will also receive better nutrition, go to school and stay in school longer; she is more likely to attend college and secure employment that pays her more. This child will also go on to have fewer children, who in turn will be healthier and more educated than her. In a nutshell, the average child born...
Ruth Rogaski, "Knowing Manchuria: Environments, the Senses, and Natural Knowledge on an Asian Borderland" (U Chicago Press, 2022)
February 10, 2023 09:00 - 59 minutesAmong all the world’s most storied and legend-filled regions, the place known to some over time as ‘Manchuria’ has had an especially wide range of ideas projected onto it. Everyone from Manchu emperors to Chinese exiles, European missionaries, Korean poets, indigenous shamans, Russian botanists, Japanese colonists and socialist planners have sought to know and understand this region, framing its vast forests, mountains, plains and earth according their own political, spiritual or scientific p...
Sheila R. Foster and Christian Iaione, "Co-Cities: Innovative Transitions toward Just and Self-Sustaining Communities" (MIT Press, 2022)
February 08, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourA new model of urban governance, mapping the route to a more equitable management of a city’s infrastructure and services. The majority of the world’s inhabitants live in cities, but even with the vast wealth and resources these cities generate, their most vulnerable populations live without adequate or affordable housing, safe water, healthy food, and other essentials. And yet, cities also often harbor the solutions to the inequalities they create, as this book makes clear. With examples dr...
Philip Gooding, "On the Frontiers of the Indian Ocean World: A History of Lake Tanganyika, c.1830-1890" (Cambridge UP, 2022)
February 07, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourOn the Frontiers of the Indian Ocean World: A History of Lake Tanganyika, c.1830-1890 (Cambridge UP, 2022) is the first interdisciplinary history of Lake Tanganyika and of eastern Africa's relationship with the wider Indian Ocean World during the nineteenth century. Philip Gooding deploys diverse source materials, including oral, climatological, anthropological, and archaeological sources, to ground interpretations of the better-known, European-authored archive in local epistemologies and und...
Sue Ann Barratt and Aleah N. Ranjitsingh, "Dougla in the Twenty-First Century: Adding to the Mix" (UP of Mississippi, 2021)
February 02, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourIdentity is often fraught for multiracial Douglas, people of both South Asian and African descent in the Caribbean. In this groundbreaking volume titled Dougla in the Twenty-First Century: Adding to the Mix (University Press of Mississippi, 2021), Sue Ann Barratt and Aleah N. Ranjitsingh explore the particular meanings of a Dougla identity and examine Dougla maneuverability both at home and in the diaspora. The authors scrutinize the perception of Douglaness over time, contemporary Dougla neg...
The 10,000 Year Build-Up to Brexit: A Conversation with Ian Morris
February 01, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourHow did Britain become a global superpower? Historian and classicist Ian Morris thinks geography has a lot to do with it. Prof. Morris discusses his latest book, Geography is Destiny: Britain and the World: A 10,000 Year History (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2022) which traces the long history of Britain's complex relationship with the European continent. He draws surprising parallels between characters ranging from the Roman Britons and Nigel Farage, to the Papacy and the European Union. Prof....
Queer Space
January 30, 2023 05:00 - 17 minutesIn this episode of High Theory, Jack Jen Gieseking tells us about queer space. Queer geographies matter alongside queer temporalities. And it turns out that lesbian life in the 1950s cannot be generalized from the specific history of Buffalo, New York. In the episode they reference a number of scholarly books including J. Jack Halberstam, In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives (NYU Press, 2005); Elizabeth Freeman, Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories (Duk...
Stephanie C. Kane, "Just One Rain Away: The Ethnography of River-City Flood Control" (McGill-Queen's UP, 2022)
January 25, 2023 09:00 - 44 minutesNot long ago it seemed flood control experts were close to mastering the unruly flows funnelling toward Hudson Bay and the Prairie city of Winnipeg. But as more intense and out-of-synch flood events occur, wary cities like Winnipeg continue to depend on systems and specifications that will soon be out of date. Rivers have impulses that defy many of the basic human assumptions underpinning otherwise sophisticated technologies. This is the river-city expression of climate change. In Just One R...
Namita Vijay Dharia, "The Industrial Ephemeral: Labor and Love in Indian Architecture and Construction" (U California Press, 2022)
January 22, 2023 09:00 - 53 minutesWhat transformative effects does a multimillion-dollar industry have on those who work within it? The Industrial Ephemeral presents the untold stories of the people, politics, and production chains behind architecture, real estate, and construction in areas surrounding New Delhi, India. In The Industrial Ephemeral: Labor and Love in Indian Architecture and Construction (U California Press, 2022), the personal histories of those in India's large laboring classes are brought to life as Namita ...
David Collier and Gerardo L. Munck, "Critical Junctures and Historical Legacies: Insights and Methods for Comparative Social Science" (Rowman & Littlefield, 2022)
January 21, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourOver the past 50 years, scholars across the social sciences have employed critical juncture analysis to understand how social orders are created, become entrenched, and change. In this book, leading scholars from several disciplines offer the first coordinated effort to define this field of research, assess its theoretical and methodological foundations, and use a critical assessment of current practices as a basis for guiding its future. Contributors include stars in this field who have writ...
Adam Lajeunesse, "Lock, Stock, and Icebergs: A History of Canada's Arctic Maritime Sovereignty" (UBC Press, 2016)
January 21, 2023 09:00 - 59 minutesIn April 1988, after years of failed negotiations over the status of the Northwest Passage, Brian Mulroney gave Ronald Reagan a globe, pointed to the Arctic, and said "Ron that's ours. We own it lock, stock, and icebergs." A simple statement, it summed up Ottawa's official policy: Canada owns the icy waters that wind their way through the Arctic Archipelago. Behind the scenes, however, successive governments have spent over a century trying to figure out how to enforce this claim and on which...
Malini Ambach et al., "Temples, Texts, and Networks: South Indian Perspectives" (HASP, 2022)
January 19, 2023 09:00 - 42 minutesFor many centuries, Hindu temples and shrines have been of great importance to South Indian religious, social and political life. Aside from being places of worship, they are also pilgrimage destinations, centres of learning, political hotspots, and foci of economic activities. In these temples, not only the human and the divine interact, but they are also meeting places of different members of the communities, be they local or coming from afar. Hindu temples do not exist in isolation, but st...
Steffen Mau, "Sorting Machines: The Reinvention of the Border in the 21st Century" (Polity Press, 2022)
January 18, 2023 09:00 - 42 minutesIt is commonly thought that, thanks to globalization, nation-state borders are becoming increasingly porous. In Sorting Machines: The Reinvention of the Border in the 21st Century (Polity, 2022) Steffen Mau shows that this view is misleading: borders are not getting more permeable in the era of globalization, but rather are being turned into powerful sorting machines. Today they fulfill their separation function better and more effectively than ever. While the cross-border movement of people ...
James C. Rhoads et al., "Cultivating Q Methodology: Essays Honoring Steven R. Brown" (Bookbaby, 2022)
January 18, 2023 09:00 - 48 minutesCultivating Q Methodology is a collection of essays is in honor of Professor Steven R. Brown, the preeminent scholar of Q methodology. Q methodology, innovated by the British physicist/psychologist William Stephenson (1902-1989), Q methodology is a conceptual framework and set of procedures to systematically and scientifically study the subjective. Professor Brown has dedicated his academic life, more than 50 years and counting, to advancing the methodology and Stephenson's profound ideas. Ea...
Carwil Bjork-James, "The Sovereign Street: Making Revolution in Urban Bolivia" (U Arizona Press, 2020)
January 15, 2023 09:00 - 56 minutesIn the early twenty-first century Bolivian social movements made streets, plazas, and highways into the decisively important spaces for acting politically, rivaling and at times exceeding voting booths and halls of government. The Sovereign Street documents this important period, showing how indigenous-led mass movements reconfigured the politics and racial order of Bolivia from 1999 to 2011. Drawing on interviews with protest participants, on-the-ground observation, and documentary research...
Mathew Gandy, "Natura Urbana: Ecological Constellations in Urban Space" (MIT Press, 2022)
December 30, 2022 09:00 - 32 minutesIn his new book, Natura Urbana: Ecological Constellations in Urban Space (MIT Press, 2022), Mathew Gandy explores urban nature as a multilayered material and symbolic entity. The book examines the articulation of alternative, and in some cases, counterhegemonic, sources of knowledge about urban nature produced by artists, writers, scientists, as well as curious citizens, including voices seldom heard in environmental discourse. The book is driven by Dr. Gandy’s long-standing fascination with ...
Naa Oyo A. Kwate, "White Burgers, Black Cash: Fast Food from Black Exclusion to Exploitation" (U Minnesota Press, 2023)
December 25, 2022 09:00 - 44 minutesThe long and pernicious relationship between fast food restaurants and the African American community. Today, fast food is disproportionately located in Black neighborhoods and marketed to Black Americans through targeted advertising. But throughout much of the twentieth century, fast food was developed specifically for White urban and suburban customers, purposefully avoiding Black spaces. In White Burgers, Black Cash: Fast Food from Black Exclusion to Exploitation (U Minnesota Press, 2023)...