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
The Future of Global Trade: A Discussion with Shannon K. O'Neil
December 22, 2022 09:00 - 45 minutesCritics of globalisation come in many forms from environmentalists to trade unionists and many others in between. In the midst of all the controversy less attention has been paid to how big a phenomenon globalisation actually is and how it compares to another trend – regionalism. In this podcast Owen Bennett Jones discusses The Globalisation Myth: Why Regions Matter (Yale University Press, 2022) with its author, Shannon K. O Neil. Owen Bennett-Jones is a freelance journalist and writer. A f...
Munira Khayyat, "A Landscape of War: Ecologies of Resistance and Survival in South Lebanon" (U California Press, 2022)
December 18, 2022 09:00 - 1 hourWhat worlds take root in war? In A Landscape of War: Ecologies of Resistance and Survival in South Lebanon (U California Press, 2022), anthropologist Munira Khayyat describes life along the southern border of Lebanon, where resistant ecologies thrive amid a terrain of perennial war. A Landscape of War takes us to frontline villages where armed invasions, indiscriminate bombings, and scattered land mines have become the environment where everyday life is waged. This book dwells with multispeci...
Off-Shore Aesthetics
December 16, 2022 09:00 - 20 minutesSritama Chatterjee talks about a model of literary criticism that she developed in the process of writing her new essay on shipbreaking in Bangladesh. It is a form of materialist understanding for texts, places, and geographies together, taking into account particular signifiers of a place and looking at correspondent literary responses. Sritama is a literary and cultural theorist of the Indian Ocean World, in the Literature program at the Dietrich School of Arts and sciences, University of P...
Joanne Yao, "The Ideal River: How Control of Nature Shaped the International Order" (Manchester UP, 2022)
December 14, 2022 09:00 - 40 minutesEnvironmental politics has traditionally been a peripheral concern for international relations theory, but increasing alarm over global environmental challenges has elevated international society's relationship with the natural world into the theoretical limelight. IR theory's engagement with environmental politics, however, has largely focused on interstate cooperation in the late twentieth century, with less attention paid to how the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century quest to tame nature c...
Sarah Milne, "Corporate Nature: An Insider's Ethnography of Global Conservation" (U Arizona Press, 2022)
December 12, 2022 09:00 - 52 minutesIn 2012, Cambodia’s most prominent environmental activist was brutally murdered in a high-profile conservation area in the Cardamom Mountains. Tragic and terrible, this event magnifies a crisis in humanity’s efforts to save nature: failure of the very tools and systems at hand for advancing global environmental action. Sarah Milne spent more than a decade working for and observing global conservation projects in Cambodia. During this time, she saw how big environmental NGOs can operate rather...
Anca Parvulescu and Manuela Boatcă, "Creolizing the Modern: Transylvania across Empires" (Cornell UP, 2022)
December 10, 2022 09:00 - 42 minutesThe episode features Anca Parvulescu and Manuela Boatca, co-authors of an extraordinary, field-shifting new book – Creolizing the Modern: Transylvania across Empires (Cornell University Press, 2022). Dr. Boatca is a Professor of Sociology at the University of Freiburg in Germany, where she teaches and publishes widely on world-systems analysis, decolonial perspectives on global inequalities, gender and citizenship in modernity/coloniality, and the geopolitics of knowledge in Eastern Europe, L...
Prakash Kashwan, "Climate Justice in India" (Cambridge UP, 2022)
December 09, 2022 09:00 - 58 minutesPrakash Kashwan's edited volume Climate Justice in India (Cambridge UP, 2022) brings together a collective of academics, activists, and artists to paint a collage of action-oriented visions for a climate just India. This unique and agenda setting volume informs researchers and readers interested in topics of just transition, energy democracy, intersectionality of access to drinking water, agroecology and women's land rights, national and state climate plans, urban policy, caste justice, and e...
Ted Conover, "Cheap Land Colorado: Off-Gridders at America's Edge" (Knopf, 2022)
December 07, 2022 09:00 - 53 minutesToday I talked to Ted Conover, author of Cheap Land Colorado: Off-Gridders at America's Edge (Knopf, 2022) In May 2017, Conover went to Colorado to explore firsthand a rural way of life that is about living cheaply, on your own land—and keeping clear of the mainstream. The failed subdivisions of the enormous San Luis Valley make this possible. Five-acre lots on the high prairie can be had for five thousand dollars, sometimes less. Conover volunteered for a local group trying to prevent homele...
Denise Ferreira Da Silva, "Unpayable Debt" (Sternberg Press, 2022)
December 03, 2022 09:00 - 48 minutesUnpayable Debt (Sternberg Press, 2022) examines the relationships among coloniality, raciality, and global capital from a black feminist “poethical” perspective. Inspired by Octavia E. Butler's 1979 sci-fi novel Kindred, in which an African-American writer is transported back in time to the antebellum South to save her owner-ancestor, Unpayable Debt relates the notion of value to coloniality—both economic and ethical. Focusing on the philosophy behind value, Denise Ferreira da Silva exposes c...
Beverley Clough, "The Spaces of Mental Capacity Law: Moving Beyond Binaries" (Routledge, 2021)
December 03, 2022 09:00 - 53 minutesThis book cuts new ground, challenging the assumption of law as an objective concept. It draws out the way that binary frameworks situate and create the notion of the individual in law, delininating responsibilities and rights between concepts such as the state / individual, public / private, care / disability and capacity / incapacity. In The Spaces of Mental Capacity Law: Moving Beyond Binaries (Routledge, 2022) Dr. Beverley Clough draws into question spatial dynamics of law and disability....
Chris McMorran, "Ryokan: Mobilizing Hospitality in Rural Japan" (U Hawaii Press, 2022)
December 02, 2022 09:00 - 36 minutesToday I talked to Chris McMorran about his new book Ryokan: Mobilizing Hospitality in Rural Japan (U Hawaii Press, 2022). Amid the decline of many of Japan’s rural communities, the hot springs village resort of Kurokawa Onsen is a rare, bright spot. Its two dozen traditional inns, or ryokan, draw nearly a million tourists a year eager to admire its landscape, experience its hospitality, and soak in its hot springs. As a result, these ryokan have enticed village youth to return home to take ov...
Yahia Shawkat, "Egypt's Housing Crisis: The Shaping of Urban Space" (American U in Cairo Press, 2020)
December 02, 2022 09:00 - 32 minutesAlong with football and religion, housing is a fundamental cornerstone of Egyptian life: it can make or break marriage proposals, invigorate or slow down the economy, and popularize or embarrass a ruler. Housing is political. Almost every Egyptian ruler over the last eighty years has directly associated himself with at least one large-scale housing project. It is also big business, with Egypt currently the world leader in per capita housing production, building at almost double China’s rate, ...
94 Elizabeth Kolbert on the Nature of the Future (GT, JP, NS, HY)
December 01, 2022 09:00 - 46 minutesHow should humans respond to our ongoing human-made climate catastrophe? To answer that question, Recall this Book turned to prize-winning climate reporter Elizabeth Kolbert, who visited Brandeis this Fall. The topic was Under a White Sky, her recent book that documents the responses to the climate crisis ranging from a form of climate engineering that shoots reflective particles into the air to cool the atmosphere, to negative emission technologies that capture and inject carbon dioxide unde...
Jillian Schwedler, "Protesting Jordan: Geographies of Power and Dissent" (Stanford UP, 2022)
November 30, 2022 09:00 - 41 minutesProtest has been a key method of political claim-making in Jordan from the late Ottoman period to the present day. More than moments of rupture within normal-time politics, protests have been central to challenging state power, as well as reproducing it—and the spatial dynamics of protests play a central role in the construction of both state and society. With this book, Jillian Schwedler considers how space and geography influence protests and repression, and, in challenging conventional nar...
Florian Köhler, "Space, Place and Identity: Wodaabe of Niger in the 21st Century" (Berhahn Book, 2020)
November 29, 2022 09:00 - 54 minutesKnown as highly mobile cattle nomads, the Wodaabe in Niger are today increasingly engaged in a transformation process towards a more diversified livelihood based primarily on agro-pastoralism and urban work migration. Space, Place and Identity: The Wodaabe of Niger in the 21st Century (Berghahn Books, 2020) by Florian Köhler examines recent transformations in spatial patterns among the Wodaabe, notably in the context of urban migration and in processes of sedentarization in rural proto-villag...
John Keay, "Himalaya: Exploring the Roof of the World" (Bloomsbury, 2022)
November 24, 2022 09:00 - 44 minutes“History has not been kind to Himalaya,” writes historian and travel writer John Keay in his latest book Himalaya: Exploring the Roof of the World (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2022). The region, nestled between India, China and Central Asia, has long been subject to political and imperial intrigue–and at times violent invasion. But the region also provided a wealth of scientific information, like geographers puzzling over how these tall peaks were thrust upwards by plate tectonics. And, of course,...
Michael A. Verney, "A Great and Rising Nation: Naval Exploration and Global Empire in the Early US Republic" (U Chicago Press, 2022)
November 23, 2022 09:00 - 52 minutesA Great and Rising Nation: Naval Exploration and Global Empire in the Early US Republic (University of Chicago Press, 2022) by Dr. Michael A. Verney illuminates the unexplored early decades of the United States’ imperialist naval aspirations. Conventional wisdom holds that, until the Spanish-American War of 1898, the United States was a feeble player on the world stage, with an international presence rooted in commerce rather than military might. Michael A. Verney’s A Great and Rising Nation ...
Caroline Roope, "The History of the London Underground Map" (Pen and Sword Transport, 2022)
November 18, 2022 09:00 - 1 hourFew transportation maps can boast the pedigree that London’s iconic ‘Tube’ map can. Sported on t-shirts, keyrings, duvet covers, and most recently, downloaded an astonishing twenty million times in app form, the map remains a long-standing icon of British design and ingenuity. Hailed by the art and design community as a cultural artefact, it has also inspired other culturally important pieces of artwork, and in 2006 was voted second in BBC 2’s Great British Design Test. But it almost didn’t m...
Natalie Koch, "Spatializing Authoritarianism" (Syracuse UP, 2022)
November 14, 2022 09:00 - 1 hourHow do authoritarian political leaders use the built environment to shape understandings of national identity and history? How do major urban development projects affect the political fortunes of authoritarian governments? Why do so many people routinely experience social control and the threat of violence in nominally democratic regimes? These are some of the questions that the contributors to the new edited volume Spatializing Authoritarianism (Syracuse UP, 2022) hope to answer. My guest to...
June Carolyn Erlick, "Natural Disasters in Latin America and the Caribbean: Coping with Calamity" (Routledge, 2021)
November 07, 2022 09:00 - 1 hourIn Natural Disasters in Latin America and the Caribbean: Coping with Calamity (Routledge, 2021), June Carolyn Erlick explores the relationship between natural disasters and civil society, immigration and diaspora communities and the long-term impact on emotional health. Natural disasters shape history and society and, in turn, their long-range impact is determined by history and society. This is especially true in Latin America and the Caribbean, where climate change is increasing the frequen...
Thomas G. Cowan, "Subaltern Frontiers: Property and Labour in the Neoliberal Indian City" (Cambridge UP, 2022)
November 04, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourIn urban and peri-urban areas across the Global South, politicians, planners and developers are engaged in a voracious scramble to refashion land for global real estate investment and transfer state power to private sector actors. Much of this development has taken place on the outskirts of the traditional metropoles, in the territorially flexible urban frontier. At the forefront of these processes in India, is Gurgaon, a privately developed metropolis on the south-western hinterlands of New ...
Mike Owen Benediktsson, "In the Midst of Things: The Social Lives of Objects in the Public Spaces of New York City" (Princeton UP, 2022)
November 01, 2022 08:00 - 48 minutesHow ordinary urban objects influence our behavior, exacerbate inequality, and encourage social change Assumptions about human behavior lie hidden in plain sight all around us, programmed into the design and regulation of the material objects we encounter on a daily basis. In the Midst of Things: The Social Lives of Objects in the Public Spaces of New York City (Princeton UP, 2022) takes an in-depth look at the social lives of five objects commonly found in the public spaces of New York City a...
Ian Morris, "Geography Is Destiny: Britain and the World--A 10,000-Year History" (FSG, 2022)
October 31, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourIn Geography Is Destiny: Britain and the World--A 10,000-Year History (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2022), Ian Morris chronicles the eight-thousand-year history of Britain's relationship to Europe as it has changed in the context of a globalizing world. When Britain voted to leave the European Union in 2016, the 48 percent who wanted to stay and the 52 percent who wanted to go each accused the other of stupidity, fraud, and treason. In reality, the Brexit debate merely reran a script written eig...
Lilie Chouliaraki and Myria Georgiou, "The Digital Border: Migration, Technology, Power" (NYU Press, 2022)
October 17, 2022 08:00 - 50 minutesHow do digital technologies shape the experiences and meanings of migration? As the numbers of people fleeing war, poverty, and environmental disaster reach unprecedented levels worldwide, states also step up their mechanisms of border control. In this, they rely on digital technologies, big data, artificial intelligence, social media platforms, and institutional journalism to manage not only the flow of people at crossing-points, but also the flow of stories and images of human mobility that...
Sandeep Banerjee, "Space, Utopia and Indian Decolonization: Literary Pre-Figurations of the Postcolony" (Routledge, 2021)
October 14, 2022 08:00 - 38 minutesSandeep Banerjee's book Space, Utopia and Indian Decolonization: Literary Pre-Figurations of the Postcolony (Routledge, 2021) illuminates the spatial utopianism of South Asian anti-colonial texts by showing how they refuse colonial spatial imaginaries to re-imagine the British Indian colony as the postcolony in diverse and contested ways. Focusing on the literary field of South Asia between, largely, the 1860s and 1920s, it underlines the centrality of literary imagination and representation ...
Camilla Hawthorne, "Contesting Race and Citizenship: Youth Politics in the Black Mediterranean" (Cornell UP, 2022)
October 12, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourContesting Race and Citizenship: Youth Politics in the Black Mediterranean (Cornell University Press, 2022) is an original study of Black politics and varieties of political mobilization in Italy. Although there is extensive research on first-generation immigrants and refugees who traveled from Africa to Italy, there is little scholarship about the experiences of Black people who were born and raised in Italy. Camilla Hawthorne focuses on the ways Italians of African descent have become entan...
Alan Warde et al., "The Social Significance of Dining Out: A Study of Continuity and Change" (Manchester UP, 2020)
October 12, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourDining out used to be considered exceptional. However, the Food Standards Authority reported that in 2014, one meal in six was eaten away from home in Britain. Previously considered a necessary substitute for an inability to obtain a meal in a family home, dining out has become a popular recreational activity for a majority of the population, offering pleasure as well as refreshment. The Social Significance of Dining Out: A Study of Continuity and Change (Manchester UP, 2020) draws on a major...
A Region of the Mind: U.S. Northern Plains and Canadian Prairies
October 06, 2022 08:00 - 37 minutesGreg Marchildon interviews Molly P. Rozum, the author of Grasslands Grown: Creating Place on the U.S. Northern Plains and Canadian Prairies (U of Nebraska P & U of Manitoba P, 2021). Molly Rozum is currently the Ronald R. Nelson Chair of Great Plains and South Dakota History at the University of South Dakota. She received her PhD in history from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and has worked on the history of this transnational region throughout her career. Although she grew u...
Jean-Thomas Tremblay, "Breathing Aesthetics" (Duke UP, 2022)
September 29, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourIn Breathing Aesthetics (Duke University Press (2022), Jean-Thomas Tremblay argues that difficult breathing indexes the uneven distribution of risk in a contemporary era marked by the increasing contamination, weaponization, and monetization of air. Tremblay shows how biopolitical and necropolitical forces tied to the continuation of extractive capitalism, imperialism, and structural racism are embodied and experienced through respiration. They identify responses to the crisis in breathing in...
Abigail Perkiss, "Hurricane Sandy on New Jersey's Forgotten Shore" (Cornell UP, 2022)
September 28, 2022 08:00 - 34 minutesAfter the tumultuous night of October 29, 2012, the residents of Monmouth, Ocean, and Atlantic Counties faced an enormous and pressing question: What to do? The stories captured in this book encompass their answer to that question: the clean-up efforts, the work with governmental and non-governmental aid agencies, and the fraught choices concerning rebuilding. Through a rich and varied set of oral histories that provide perspective on disaster planning, response, and recovery in New Jersey, A...
Juan Pablo Pardo-Guerra, "The Quantified Scholar: How Research Evaluations Transformed the British Social Sciences" (Columbia UP, 2022)
September 26, 2022 08:00 - 43 minutesHow do metrics and quantification shape social science? In The Quantified Scholar: How Research Evaluations Transformed the British Social Sciences (Columbia UP, 2022), Juan Pablo Pardo-Guerra, an Associate Professor in sociology at the University of California, San Diego, explores this question using a case study of British academia. The book combines a rich array of quantitative and qualitative analysis, demonstrating the transformation of working conditions, institutional contexts, and res...
David Max Moerman, "The Japanese Buddhist World Map: Religious Vision and the Cartographic Imagination" (U Hawaii Press, 2021)
September 23, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourFrom the fourteenth through the nineteenth centuries Japanese monks created hundreds of maps to construct and locate their place in a Buddhist world. Expansively illustrated with multiple maps and illustrations, The Japanese Buddhist World Map: Religious Vision and the Cartographic Imagination (University of Hawai’i Press, 2021) by D. Max Moerman is the first monograph of its kind to explore the largely unknown archive of Japanese Buddhist world maps and analyze their production, reproduction...
Catalina M. de Onís, "Energy Islands: Metaphors of Power, Extractivism, and Justice in Puerto Rico" (U California Press, 2021)
September 22, 2022 19:00 - 40 minutesEnergy Islands: Metaphors of Power, Extractivism, and Justice in Puerto Rico (University of California Press, 2021) provides an urgent and nuanced portrait of collective action that resists racial capitalism, colonialism, and climate disruption. Weaving together historical and ethnographic research, this story challenges the master narratives of Puerto Rico as a tourist destination and site of "natural" disasters to demonstrate how fossil fuel economies are inextricably entwined with colonial...
Andrew Grant, "The Concrete Plateau: Urban Tibetans and the Chinese Civilizing Machine" (Cornell UP, 2022)
September 21, 2022 08:00 - 46 minutesIn The Concrete Plateau: Urban Tibetans and the Chinese Civilizing Machine (Cornell UP, 2022), Grant examines how China’s urban development policies of frontier cities like Xining (Tib. zi ling) accompanied civilizational projects that deployed various discursive and non-discursive practices aimed at creating ideologically homogeneous and modern places. Xining or Ziling is the capital of Qinghai (Tib. mtsho sngon) province and it is the largest city on the Tibetan Plateau and home to over 200...
Mrill Ingram, "Loving Orphaned Space: The Art and Science of Belonging to Earth" (Temple UP, 2022)
September 16, 2022 09:00 - 46 minutesHow we relate to orphaned space matters. Voids, marginalia, empty spaces—from abandoned gas stations to polluted waterways—are created and maintained by politics, and often go unquestioned. In Loving Orphaned Space: The Art and Science of Belonging to Earth (Temple UP, 2022), Mrill Ingram provides a call to action to claim and to cherish these neglected spaces and make them a source of inspiration through art and/or remuneration. Ingram advocates not only for “urban greening” and “green plann...
On Maciej Miechowita's "Treatise on the Two Sarmatias"
September 09, 2022 08:00 - 30 minutesIn Treatise on the Two Sarmatias, Polish scholar Maciej Miechowita argued that two mountain ranges that were described on maps dating back to antiquity did not, in fact, exist. This was the 1500s, and Europeans’ understanding of the world was changing. When they looked at the old maps, things didn’t always line up. New mapmakers were pushing back against ancient maps that showed a world they didn’t see or didn’t believe in. Michael Tworek is an associate professor in the History Department at...
Justin Grimmer et al., "Text as Data: A New Framework for Machine Learning and the Social Sciences" (Princeton UP, 2022)
September 05, 2022 08:00 - 56 minutesFrom social media posts and text messages to digital government documents and archives, researchers are bombarded with a deluge of text reflecting the social world. This textual data gives unprecedented insights into fundamental questions in the social sciences, humanities, and industry. Meanwhile new machine learning tools are rapidly transforming the way science and business are conducted. Text as Data shows how to combine new sources of data, machine learning tools, and social science rese...
Phil Hubbard, "Borderland: Identity and Belonging at the Edge of England" (Manchester UP, 2022)
September 02, 2022 08:00 - 49 minutesOver recent years, the issues of Brexit, COVID and the 'migrant crisis' put Kent in the headlines like never before. Images of asylum seekers on Kent beaches, lorries queued on motorways and the crumbling white cliffs of Dover all spoke to national anxieties, and were used to support ideas that severing ties with the EU was the best - or worst - thing the UK has ever done. In Borderland: Identity and Belonging at the Edge of England (Manchester UP, 2022), Phil Hubbard - an exiled man of Kent ...
Leslie Kern, "Gentrification is Inevitable and Other Lies" (Verso, 2022)
August 31, 2022 08:00 - 51 minutesWhat does gentrification look like? Can we even agree that it is a process that replaces one community with another? It is a question of class? Or of economic opportunity? Who does it affect the most? Is there any way to combat it? In Gentrification is Inevitable and Other Lies (Verso, 2022), Leslie Kern travels from Toronto, New York, London, Paris, and San Francisco and scrutinises the myth and lies that surround this most urgent urban crisis of our times. First observed in 1950s London, an...
Kareem Rabie, "Palestine Is Throwing a Party and the Whole World Is Invited: Capital and State Building in the West Bank" (Duke UP, 2021)
August 26, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourIn 2008, Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad invited international investors to the first-ever Palestine Investment Conference, which was designed to jump-start the process of integrating Palestine into the global economy. As Fayyad described the conference, Palestine is “throwing a party, and the whole world is invited.” In Palestine Is Throwing a Party and the Whole World Is Invited: Capital and State Building in the West Bank (Duke UP, 2021), Kareem Rabie examines how the conference an...
Frederico Freitas, "Nationalizing Nature: Iguazu Falls and National Parks at the Brazil-Argentina Border" (Cambridge UP, 2021)
August 26, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourIn Nationalizing Nature: Iguazu Falls and National Parks at the Brazil-Argentina Border (Cambridge UP, 2021), Frederico Freitas uncovers the crucial role played by conservation in the region’s territorial development by exploring how Brazil and Argentina used national parks to nationalize borderlands. In the 1930s, Brazil and Argentina created some of their first national parks around the massive Iguazu Falls, shared by the two countries. The parks were designed as tools to attract migrants f...
Lindsay Starkey, "Encountering Water in Early Modern Europe and Beyond" (Amsterdam UP, 2020)
August 09, 2022 08:00 - 54 minutesWhat is holding the oceans back from entirely flooding the earth? While a twenty-first century thinker may approach the answer to this question within a framework of gravity and geologic deep-time, Lindsay Starkey demonstrates in her monograph, Encountering Water in Early Modern Europe and Beyond: Redefining the Universe Through Natural Philosophy, Religious Reformations, and Sea Voyaging (Amsterdam University Press, 2020) how thinkers from antiquity to the sixteen-century held their own beli...
Tema Milstein and José Castro-Sotomayor, "Routledge Handbook of Ecocultural Identity" (Routledge, 2020)
August 03, 2022 08:00 - 50 minutesThe Routledge Handbook of Ecocultural Identity (Routledge, 2020) brings the ecological turn to sociocultural understandings of self. Tema Milstein and José Castro-Sotomayor introduce a broad, insightful assembly of original theory and research on planetary positionalities in flux in the Anthropocene – or what in this Handbook cultural ecologist David Abram presciently renames the Humilocene, a new “epoch of humility.” Forty international authors craft a kaleidoscopic lens, focusing on the fol...
Erica Gies, "Water Always Wins: Thriving in an Age of Drought and Deluge" (U Chicago Press, 2022)
July 29, 2022 08:00 - 57 minutesTrouble with water – increasingly frequent, extreme floods and droughts – is one of the first obvious signs of climate change. Meanwhile, urban sprawl, industrial agriculture and engineered water infrastructure are making things worse. As our control attempts fail, we are forced to recognize an eternal truth: sooner or later, water always wins. In Water Always Wins: Thriving in an Age of Drought and Deluge (U Chicago Press, 2022), award-winning science journalist Erica Gies follows water 'det...
Lachlan Fleetwood, "Science on the Roof of the World: Empire and the Remaking of the Himalaya" (Cambridge UP, 2022)
July 28, 2022 08:00 - 45 minutesToday, the idea that the Himalayas have the world’s tallest peaks—by a large margin—is entirely uncontroversial. Just about anyone can name Mount Everest and K2 as the world’s tallest and second-tallest mountains respectively. But the idea that this mountain range had the highest summits used to be quite controversial. Mountaineers claimed that the Himalayas could not be taller than peaks in Europe or South America, like Ecuador’s Chimborazo. Even when it was proven that the Himalayas were ta...
Olena Palko and Constantin Ardeleanu, "Making Ukraine: Negotiating, Contesting, and Drawing the Borders in the Twentieth Century" (McGill-Queen's UP, 2022)
July 26, 2022 08:00 - 59 minutesRussia's illegal annexation of Crimea in 2014 and the ongoing war in eastern Ukraine have brought scholarly and public attention to Ukraine's borders. Making Ukraine aims to investigate the various processes of negotiation, delineation, and contestation that have shaped the country's borders throughout the past century. Essays by contributors from various historical fields consider how, when, and under what conditions the borders that historically define the country were agreed upon. A divers...
Rosetta S. Elkin, "Plant Life: The Entangled Politics of Afforestation" (U Minnesota Press, 2022)
July 20, 2022 08:00 - 41 minutesIn Plant Life: The Entangled Politics of Afforestation (U Minnesota Press, 2022), Rosetta S. Elkin explores the procedures of afforestation, the large-scale planting of trees in otherwise treeless environments, including grasslands, prairies, and drylands. Elkin reveals that planting a tree can either be one of the ultimate offerings to thriving on this planet, or one of the most extreme perversions of human agency over it. Using three supracontinental case studies--scientific forestry in the...
Lorna Down and Therese Ferguson, "Education for Sustainable Development in the Caribbean: Pedagogy, Processes and Practices" (U West Indies Press, 2021)
July 15, 2022 08:00 - 55 minutesEducation for Sustainable Development in the Caribbean: Pedagogy, Processes and Practices (University of the West Indies Press, 2022) offers a unique perspective on educational approaches to creating a sustainable world. Lorna Down and Therese Ferguson complement their theoretical discussions with practical, “real world” engagements. Case studies and current research ground teaching and learning for sustainability and enable diverse communities of learners, inside and outside of classrooms, t...
Laura A. Ogden, "Loss and Wonder at the World’s End" (Duke UP, 2021)
July 15, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourIn this podcast Laura A. Ogden, cultural anthropologist at Dartmouth College, introduces her beautifully crafted book Loss and Wonder at the World's End (Duke University Press, 2021). In Loss and Wonder at the World's End, Ogden brings together animals, people, and things—from beavers, stolen photographs, lichen, American explorers, and birdsong—to catalog the ways environmental change and colonial history are entangled in the Fuegian Archipelago of southernmost Chile and Argentina. Repeated ...
Vivian Jing Zhan, "China's Contained Resource Curse: How Minerals Shape State Capital Labor Relations" (Cambridge UP, 2022)
July 14, 2022 08:00 - 47 minutesContrary to intuition, many countries have found that having abundant natural resources such as petroleum or diamonds may be a curse as much as a blessing. Broad-based economic development may be stunted as resource extraction dominates the economy, and politics may be corrupted as different interest groups focus on controlling and redistributing resource rents instead of on governing well. In the worst cases, the fight for control over this wealth breaks into armed conflict. China is not usu...