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
Kian Goh, "Form and Flow: The Spatial Politics of Urban Resilience and Climate Justice" (MIT Press, 2021)
February 17, 2022 09:00 - 34 minutesCities around the world are formulating plans to respond to climate change and adapt to its impact. Often, marginalized urban residents resist these plans, offering “counterplans” to protest unjust and exclusionary actions. In Form and Flow: The Spatial Politics of Urban Resilience and Climate Justice (MIT Press, 2021), Kian Goh examines climate change response strategies in three cities—New York, Jakarta, and Rotterdam—and the mobilization of community groups to fight the perceived injustice...
Molly P. Rozum, "Grasslands Grown: Creating Place on the U.S. Northern Plains and Canadian Prairies" (U Nebraska Press, 2021)
February 11, 2022 09:00 - 1 hourIn Grasslands Grown: Creating Place on the U.S. Northern Plains and Canadian Rockies (University of Nebraska Press, 2021), Molly P. Rozum explores the two related concepts of regional identity and sense of place by examining a single North American ecological region: the U.S. Great Plains and the Canadian Prairie Provinces. All or parts of modern-day Alberta, Montana, Saskatchewan, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Manitoba form the center of this transnational region. As children, the first po...
Abby S. Waysdorf, "Fan Sites: Film Tourism and Contemporary Fandom" (U Iowa Press, 2021)
February 09, 2022 09:00 - 1 hourIn her new book, Fan Sites: Film Tourism and Contemporary Fandom (U Iowa Press, 2021)(University of Iowa Press, 2021), Abby Waysdorf explores why and how we experience film and television-related places, and what the growth of this practice means for contemporary fandom. Through four case studies—Game of Thrones tourism in Dubrovnik, Croatia and Northern Ireland, the Wizarding World of Harry Potter theme parks in Orlando, Florida, fandom of The Prisoner in Portmeirion, Wales, and Friends even...
Leilei Chen, "Re-Orienting China: Travel Writing and Cross-Cultural Understanding" (U Regina Press, 2016)
February 09, 2022 09:00 - 1 hourRe-Orienting China: Travel Writing and Cross-Cultural Understanding (U Regina Press, 2016) challenges the notion of the travel writer as imperialistic, while exploring the binary opposition of self/other. Featuring analyses of rarely studied writers on post-1949 China, including Jan Wong, Jock T. Wilson, Peter Hessler, Leslie T. Chang, Hill Gates, and Yi-Fu Tuan, Re-Orienting China demonstrates the transformative power of travel, as it changes our preconceived notions of home and abroad. Draw...
Colin Thubron, "The Amur River: Between Russia and China" (Harper, 2021)
February 03, 2022 09:00 - 45 minutesIt’s a great pleasure to welcome Colin Thubron to the Asian Review of Books podcast. Travel writer and novelist, Colin has written countless books that bring faraway sights and peoples to English-speaking readers–many of which covered regions in China, Russia, Central Asia and elsewhere on the Asian continent. In this episode, Colin and I talk about The Amur River: Between Russia and China (Harper, 2021), which traces the path of the Amur from its origins in Mongolia to its end-point in the P...
Colin McFarlane, "Fragments of the City: Making and Remaking Urban Worlds" (U California Press, 2021)
February 02, 2022 09:00 - 49 minutesCities are becoming increasingly fragmented materially, socially, and spatially. From broken toilets and everyday things, to art and forms of writing, fragments are signatures of urban worlds and provocations for change. In Fragments of the City: Making and Remaking Urban Worlds (U California Press, 2021), Colin McFarlane examines such fragments, what they are and how they come to matter in the experience, politics, and expression of cities. How does the city appear when we look at it throug...
Mercy Romero, "Toward Camden" (Duke UP, 2021)
January 17, 2022 09:00 - 37 minutesIn Toward Camden (Duke UP, 2021), Mercy Romero writes about the relationships that make and sustain the largely African American and Puerto Rican Cramer Hill neighborhood in New Jersey where she grew up. She walks the city and writes outdoors to think about the collapse and transformation of property. She revisits lost and empty houses—her family's house, the Walt Whitman House, and the landscape of a vacant lot. Throughout, Romero engages with the aesthetics of fragment and ruin; her writing...
Shelly Chan, "Diaspora’s Homeland: Modern China in the Age of Global Migration" (Duke UP, 2018)
December 24, 2021 09:00 - 1 hourDiaspora’s Homeland: Modern China in the Age of Global Migration (Duke University Press, 2018) by Shelly Chan provides a broad historical study of how the mass migration of more than twenty million Chinese overseas influenced China’s politics, economics, and culture. Chan develops the concept of “diaspora moments” – a series of recurring disjunctions in which migrant temporalities come into tension with local, national, and global ones – to map the multiple historical geographies in which the...
Luis Lobo-Guerrero et al., "Mapping, Connectivity, and the Making of European Empires" (Rowman and Littlefield, 2021)
December 22, 2021 09:00 - 1 hourLuis Lobo-Guerrero is one of the three editors of this volume—Mapping, Connectivity, and the Making of European Empires—and one of the six contributing authors. He wrote the preface, “Poseidonians and the Tragedy of Mapping European Empires,” and the first two chapters, “Mapping and the Making of Imperial European Connectivity” and “Mapping and the Invention of the Early ‘Spanish’ Empire.” In this interview, Professor Lobo-Guerrero discusses the role of the map in imperial imagination over ti...
Edward J. Ayers, "Southern Journey: The Migrations of the American South, 1790-2020" (LSU Press, 2020)
December 08, 2021 09:00 - 1 hourTaking a wide focus, Southern Journey: The Migrations of the American South, 1790-2020 (LSU Press, 2020) narrates the evolution of southern history from the founding of the nation to the present day by focusing on the settling, unsettling, and resettling of the South. Using migration as the dominant theme of southern history and including indigenous, white, black, and immigrant people in the story, Edward L. Ayers cuts across the usual geographic, thematic, and chronological boundaries that s...
Till F. Paasche and James Derrick Sidaway, "Transecting Securityscapes: Dispatches from Cambodia, Iraq, and Mozambique" (U Georgia Press, 2021)
December 02, 2021 05:00 - 1 hourIn this interview, I speak with Till F. Paasche and James D. Sidaway about their new book, Transecting Securityscapes: Dispatches from Cambodia, Iraq, and Mozambique (University of Georgia Press, 2021). In addition to the book's methodological and theoretical contributions, we also discussed the extensive field research and important personal experiences informing this project. This is an innovative book on the everyday life of security, told via an examination of three sites: Cambodia, the K...
Pascale Joassart-Marcelli, "The Sixteen-Dollar Taco: Contested Geographies of Food, Ethnicity, and Gentrification" (U Washington Press, 2021)
November 30, 2021 09:00 - 42 minutesWhite middle-class eaters are increasingly venturing into historically segregated urban neighborhoods in search of "authentic" eating in restaurants run by-and originally catering to-immigrants and people of color. What does a growing white interest in these foods mean for historically immigrant neighborhoods and communities of color? What role does foodie culture play in gentrification? In The Sixteen-Dollar Taco: Contested Geographies of Food, Ethnicity, and Gentrification (U Washington Pre...
Nancy Langston, "Climate Ghosts: Migratory Species in the Anthropocene" (Brandeis UP, 2021)
November 15, 2021 09:00 - 42 minutesIn her new book Climate Ghosts: Migratory Species in the Anthropocene (Brandeis UP, 2021), environmental historian Nancy Langston explores three “ghost species” in the Great Lakes watershed—woodland caribou, common loons, and lake sturgeon. Ghost species are those that have not gone completely extinct, although they may be extirpated from a particular area. Their traces are still present, whether in DNA, in small fragmented populations, in lone individuals roaming a desolate landscape in sear...
Michelle Téllez, "Border Women and the Community of Maclovio Rojas: Autonomy in the Spaces of Neoliberal Neglect" (U Arizona Press, 2021)
November 10, 2021 09:00 - 1 hourNear Tijuana, Baja California, the autonomous community of Maclovio Rojas demonstrates what is possible for urban place-based political movements. More than a community, Maclovio Rojas is a women-led social movement that works for economic and political autonomy to address issues of health, education, housing, nutrition, and security. Border Women and the Community of Maclovio Rojas: Autonomy in the Spaces of Neoliberal Neglect (U Arizona Press, 2021) tells the story of the community’s strugg...
Vinciane Despret, "Living as a Bird" (Polity Press, 2021)
November 10, 2021 09:00 - 1 hourBirds sing to set up a territory, but the relationships between the bird, the song, the territory, and the bird’s community are highly complex and individually variable. In Living as a Bird (English translation by Helen Morrison, Polity Press, 2021), Vinciane Despret explores the concept of territory from a perspective that situates philosophical work on human conceptions of other animals within historical and contemporary empirical research into bird song and territorial behavior. Following ...
Chia-Rong Wu, "Remapping the Contested Sinosphere: The Cross-Cultural Landscape and Ethnoscape of Taiwan" (Cambria Press, 2020)
November 05, 2021 09:00 - 59 minutesIn the past four hundred years, the cultural position of Taiwan has been undergoing a series of drastic changes due to constant political turmoil. From the early seventeenth century to the late twentieth century, the ruling power of Taiwan shifted from Spaniard and Dutch to the Late-Ming Zheng regime, then to the Qing court and imperial Japan, and finally to the Kuomintang (KMT) government from China. In this regard, Taiwan has long been regarded as a supplementary addition to its cultural Ot...
Bernard Scott, "Cybernetics for the Social Sciences" (Brill, 2021)
November 03, 2021 08:00 - 1 hourOn this episode, I have the great pleasure of finally getting to talk with one of the “unsung heroes” of cybernetics, whose work has finally begun to receive the critical attention it has long deserved, and upon which I have leaned quite heavily in my own work since I entered this field. With Cybernetics for the Social Sciences, out from Brill in 2021, Bernard Scott has met a long-felt need by authoring a book that shows the foundational relevance of cybernetics for such fields as psychology,...
Hsuan L. Hsu, "The Smell of Risk: Environmental Disparities and Olfactory Aesthetics" (NYU Press, 2020)
November 02, 2021 08:00 - 51 minutesOur sense of smell is a uniquely visceral—and personal—form of experience. As Hsuan L. Hsu points out, smell has long been spurned by Western aesthetics as a lesser sense for its qualities of subjectivity, volatility, and materiality. But it is these very qualities that make olfaction a vital tool for sensing and staging environmental risk and inequality. Unlike the other senses, smell extends across space and reaches into our bodies. Hsu traces how writers, artists, and activists have deploy...
Courtney J. Campbell and Allegra Giovine, "Empty Spaces: Perspectives on Emptiness in Modern History" (U London Press, 2019)
October 28, 2021 08:00 - 52 minutesHow is emptiness made and what historical purpose does it serve? What cultural, material and natural work goes into maintaining 'nothingness'? Why have a variety of historical actors, from colonial powers to artists and urban dwellers, sought to construct, control and maintain (physically and discursively) empty space, and by which processes is emptiness discovered, visualised and reimagined? Courtney J. Campbell and Allegra Giovine's Empty Spaces: Perspectives on Emptiness in Modern History...
Cheikh Anta Babou, "The Muridiyya on the Move: Islam, Migration, and Place Making" (Ohio UP, 2021)
October 21, 2021 08:00 - 1 hourThe construction of collective identity among the Muridiyya abroad is a communal but contested endeavor. Differing conceptions of what should be the mission of Muridiyya institutions in the diaspora reveal disciples’ conflicting politics and challenge the notion of the order’s homogeneity. While some insist on the universal dimension of Ahmadu Bamba Mbakke’s calling and emphasize dawa (proselytizing), others prioritize preserving Muridiyya identity abroad by consolidating the linkages with th...
Paulina Ochoa Espejo, "On Borders: Territories, Legitimacy, and the Rights of Place" (Oxford UP, 2020)
October 21, 2021 08:00 - 1 hourWhen are borders justified? Who has a right to control them? Where should they be drawn? Today people think of borders as an island's shores. Just as beaches delimit a castaway's realm, so borders define the edges of a territory, occupied by a unified people, to whom the land legitimately belongs. Hence a territory is legitimate only if it belongs to a people unified by a civic identity. Sadly, this Desert Island Model of territorial politics forces us to choose. If we want territories, then ...
Elizabeth Carolyn Miller, "Extraction Ecologies and the Literature of the Long Exhaustion" (Princeton UP, 2021)
October 15, 2021 08:00 - 47 minutesThe 1830s to the 1930s saw the rise of large-scale industrial mining in the British imperial world. Elizabeth Carolyn Miller examines how literature of this era reckoned with a new vision of civilization where humans are dependent on finite, nonrenewable stores of earthly resources, and traces how the threatening horizon of resource exhaustion worked its way into narrative form. Britain was the first nation to transition to industry based on fossil fuels, which put its novelists and writers i...
Luis Lobo-Guerrero et al., "Imaginaries of Connectivity: The Creation of Novel Spaces of Governance" (Rowman & Littlefield, 2019)
October 12, 2021 08:00 - 1 hourImaginaries of Connectivity: The Creation of Novel Spaces of Governance (Rowman & Littlefield, 2019) addresses the problem of how the creation of novel spaces of governance relates to imaginaries of connectivity in time. While connectivity seems almost ubiquitous today, it has been imagined and practiced in various ways and to varying political effects in different historical and geographical contexts. Often the conception of new connectivities also gives birth to new spaces of governance. Th...
David B. Williams, "Homewaters: A Human and Natural History of Puget Sound" (U Washington Press, 2021)
October 06, 2021 08:00 - 1 hourHomewaters: A Human and Natural History of Puget Sound (University of Washington Press, 2021) tells a story about exploitation and a story of hope. Focusing on the life histories of both humans and the natural world, Williams presents an account of how people and place are connected by demonstrating the transformation of the landscape through geologic, ecological, and cultural lenses. Through conversations with archaeologists, biologists, and tribal authorities, and getting out in the field ...
Jaime Lowe, "Breathing Fire: Female Inmate Firefighters on the Front Line of California's Wildfires" (MCD, 2021)
October 06, 2021 08:00 - 45 minutesA dramatic, revelatory account of the female inmate firefighters who battle California wildfires for less than a dollar an hour On February 23, 2016, Shawna Lynn Jones stepped into the brush to fight a wildfire that had consumed ten acres of terrain on a steep ridge in Malibu. Jones carried fifty pounds of equipment and a chainsaw to help contain the blaze. As she fired up her saw, the earth gave way under her feet and a rock fell from above and struck her head, knocking her unconscious. A he...
Milton Santos, "The Nature of Space" (Duke UP, 2021)
October 06, 2021 08:00 - 45 minutesThe Nature of Space (Duke UP, 2021) is a translation (by Brenda Baletti) of pioneering geographer Milton Santos' A Natureza do Espaço, originally published in Brazil in 1996. The book offers a theory of human space based on relationships between time and ontology, producing a system of ideas that can catalyze a descriptive and interpretive system of geography. Santos argues that when geographers consider the inseparability of time and space, they can then transcend fragmented realities and ...
Patrice M. Dabrowski, "The Carpathians: Discovering the Highlands of Poland and Ukraine" (Northern Illinois UP, 2021)
October 01, 2021 08:00 - 56 minutesPatrice M. Dabrowski's book The Carpathians: Discovering the Highlands of Poland and Ukraine (Northern Illinois UP, 2021) tells story of how the Tatras, Eastern Carpathians, and Bieszczady Mountains went from being terra incognita to becoming the popular tourist destinations they are today. It is a story of the encounter of Polish and Ukrainian lowlanders with the wild, sublime highlands and with the indigenous highlanders--Górale, Hutsuls, Boikos, and Lemkos--and how these peoples were incor...
Mark Maslin, “Embracing the Anthropocene: Managing Human Impact” (Open Agenda, 2021)
September 30, 2021 08:00 - 1 hourEmbracing the Anthropocene: Managing Human Impact is based on an in-depth filmed conversation between Howard Burton and Mark Maslin, Professor of Geography at University College London. This wide-ranging conversation explores Prof. Maslin’s research on the Anthropocene which according to his definition began when human impacts on the planet irrevocably started to change the course of the Earth’s biological and geographical trajectory, leading to climate change, loss of biodiversity, deforesta...
Gonzalo Lizarralde, "Unnatural Disasters: Why Most Responses to Risk and Climate Change Fail But Some Succeed" (Columbia UP, 2021)
September 22, 2021 08:00 - 48 minutesUnnatural Disasters: Why Most Responses to Risk and Climate Change Fail But Some Succeed (Columbia UP, 2021) offers a new perspective on our most pressing environmental and social challenges, revealing the gaps between abstract concepts like sustainability, resilience, and innovation and the real-world experiences of people living at risk. Gonzalo Lizarralde explains how the causes of disasters are not natural but all too human: inequality, segregation, marginalization, colonialism, neolibera...
Ihnji Jon, "Cities in the Anthropocene: New Ecology and Urban Politics" (Pluto Press, 2021)
September 22, 2021 08:00 - 45 minutesClimate change is real, and extreme weather events are its physical manifestations. These extreme events affect how we live and work in cities, and subsequently the way we design, plan, and govern them. Taking action 'for the environment' is not only a moral imperative; instead, it is activated by our everyday experience in the city. Based on the author's site visits and interviews in Darwin (Australia), Tulsa (Oklahoma), Cleveland (Ohio), and Cape Town (South Africa), Ihnji Jon's Cities in t...
Katy Borner, "Atlas of Forecasts: Modeling and Mapping Desirable Futures" (MIT Press, 2021)
September 10, 2021 08:00 - 46 minutesTo envision and create the futures we want, society needs an appropriate understanding of the likely impact of alternative actions. Data models and visualizations offer a way to understand and intelligently manage complex, interlinked systems in science and technology, education, and policymaking. Atlas of Forecasts: Modeling and Mapping Desirable Futures (MIT Press, 2021), from the creator of Atlas of Science and Atlas of Knowledge, shows how we can use data to predict, communicate, and ulti...
Katy Borner, "Atlas of Forecasts: Modeling and Mapping Desirable Futures" (MIT Press, 2021)
September 10, 2021 08:00 - 46 minutesTo envision and create the futures we want, society needs an appropriate understanding of the likely impact of alternative actions. Data models and visualizations offer a way to understand and intelligently manage complex, interlinked systems in science and technology, education, and policymaking. Atlas of Forecasts: Modeling and Mapping Desirable Futures (MIT Press, 2021), from the creator of Atlas of Science and Atlas of Knowledge, shows how we can use data to predict, communicate, and ulti...
Stephen J. Pyne, "The Pyrocene: How We Created an Age of Fire, and What Happens Next" (U California Press, 2021)
September 08, 2021 08:00 - 39 minutesStephen J. Pyne's new book The Pyrocene: How We Created an Age of Fire, and What Happens Next (U California Press, 2021) tells the story of what happened when a fire-wielding species, humanity, met an especially fire-receptive time in Earth's history. Since terrestrial life first appeared, flames have flourished. Over the past two million years, however, one genus gained the ability to manipulate fire, swiftly remaking both itself and eventually the world. We developed small guts and big head...
Emily O'Gorman, "Wetlands in a Dry Land: More-Than-Human Histories of Australia's Murray-Darling Basin" (U Washington Press, 2021)
September 08, 2021 08:00 - 47 minutesIn the name of agriculture, urban growth, and disease control, humans have drained, filled, or otherwise destroyed nearly 87 percent of the world's wetlands over the past three centuries. Unintended consequences include biodiversity loss, poor water quality, and the erosion of cultural sites, and only in the past few decades have wetlands been widely recognized as worth preserving. Emily O'Gorman asks, What has counted as a wetland, for whom, and with what consequences? Using the Murray-Darli...
Lindsay Naylor, "Fair Trade Rebels: Coffee Production and Struggles for Autonomy in Chiapas" (U Minnesota Press, 2019)
September 06, 2021 08:00 - 49 minutesFair trade certified coffee is now commonly found on the supermarket shelves of the Global North, but the connections between the consumer and producer of fair trade coffee are far from simple. Lindsay Naylor’s book, Fair Trade Rebels: Coffee Production and Struggles for Autonomy in Chiapas (University of Minnesota Press, 2019), examines the contested politics of fair trade coffee production in the indigenous highlands of Mexico. Using theoretical approaches based in diverse economies scholar...
Joshua Jelly-Schapiro, "Names of New York: Discovering the City's Past, Present, and Future Through Its Place-Names" (Pantheon, 2021)
August 18, 2021 08:00 - 46 minutesGeographer and writer Joshua Jelly-Schapiro has a sharp appreciation for place, history, and the stories we tell to give meaning to our lives. All of these are present in his new book Names of New York: Discovering the City’s Past, Present and Future Through Its Place Names, published by Pantheon. Place names hold stories, Jelly-Schapiro argues, and Names of New York contains many narratives--from how Europeans garbled Native American place names to the story behind Dead Horse Bay to why New ...
Rasmus Grønfeldt Winther, "When Maps Become the World" (U Chicago Press, 2020)
August 10, 2021 08:00 - 1 hourThere are maps of the Earth’s landmasses, the universe, the ocean floors, human migration, the human brain: maps are so integral to how we interact with the world that we sometimes forget that they are not the world. In When Maps Become the World (University of Chicago Press), Rasmus Grunfeldt Winther considers how maps get made, used, and abused, and how processes and problems from cartography can be found in the ways we create and use scientific theories. Winther, who is professor of humani...
John Davies and Alexander J. Kent, "The Red Atlas: How the Soviet Union Secretly Mapped the World" (U Chicago Press, 2017)
August 06, 2021 08:00 - 1 hourThroughout the Cold War, the Soviet Union conducted an ambitious yet clandestine programme to map the world - from big cities like New York and Tokyo, to seemingly-obscure towns like Gainsborough (Lincolnshire) and Pontiac (Missouri). The programme was unlike any other of its time, encompassing a wide variety of topographic maps and city plans in incredible detail. The Red Atlas: How the Soviet Union Secretly Mapped the World (University of Chicago Press, 2017) is not only a compilation of so...
Riaz Dean, "Mapping the Great Game: Explorers, Spies & Maps in 19th Century-Central Asia, India and Tibet" (Casemate, 2019)
July 29, 2021 08:00 - 44 minutes“A map is the greatest of all epic poems, its lines and colors show the realization of great dreams.” --Gilbert Grosvenor The Great Game raged through the wilds of Central Asia during the nineteenth century, as Imperial Russia and Great Britain jostled for power. Tsarist armies gobbled up large tracts of Turkestan, advancing inexorably towards their ultimate prize, India. These rivals understood well that the first need of an army in a strange land is a reliable map, prompting desperate effor...
Simon Ferdinand, "Mapping Beyond Measure: Art, Cartography, and the Space of Global Modernity" (U Nebraska Press, 2019)
July 27, 2021 08:00 - 41 minutesIn Mapping Beyond Measure: Art, Cartography, and the Space of Global Modernity (U Nebraska Press, 2019), Simon Ferdinand analyzes diverse map-based works of painting, collage, film, walking performance, and digital drawing, made in Britain, Japan, the Netherlands, Ukraine, the United States, and the former Soviet Union, arguing that together they challenge the dominant modern view of the world as a measurable and malleable geometrical space. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.f...
Jacob Lederman, "Chasing World-Class Urbanism: Global Policy Versus Everyday Survival in Buenos Aires" (U Minnesota Press, 2020)
July 22, 2021 08:00 - 58 minutesWhat makes some cities world class? Increasingly, that designation reflects the use of a toolkit of urban planning practices and policies that circulates around the globe. These strategies—establishing creative districts dedicated to technology and design, “greening” the streets, reinventing historic districts as tourist draws—were deployed to build a globally competitive Buenos Aires after its devastating 2001 economic crisis. In this richly drawn account, Jacob Lederman explores what those ...
Stacia Ryder et al., "Environmental Justice in the Anthropocene: From (Un)Just Presents to Just Futures" (Routledge, 2021)
July 20, 2021 08:00 - 33 minutesThrough various international case studies presented by both practitioners and scholars, Environmental Justice in the Anthropocene: From (Un)Just Presents to Just Futures (Routledge, 2021) explores how an environmental justice approach is necessary for reflections on inequality in the Anthropocene and for forging societal transitions toward a more just and sustainable future. Environmental justice is a central component of sustainability politics during the Anthropocene - the current geologic...
Christian C. Lentz, "Contested Territory: Ðien Biên Phu and the Making of Northwest Vietnam" (Yale UP, 2019)
July 15, 2021 08:00 - 33 minutesWhy is Vietnam's modern history so closely associated with a place that lies only just within the country's borders? What was at stake in the contest for the mountainous Black River region that culminated in the legendary French defeat of 1954? How did the different ethnic groups living around Điện Biên Phủ position themselves, when forced to choose between France and the Democratic Republic of Vietnam? Why did some groups in the region dream of greater autonomy, under a just king, following ...
Teo Ballvé, "The Frontier Effect: State Formation and Violence in Colombia" (Cornell UP, 2020)
July 13, 2021 08:00 - 43 minutesIn The Frontier Effect: State Formation and Violence in Colombia (Cornell UP, 2020), Teo Ballvé challenges the notion that in Urabá, Colombia, the cause of the region's violent history and unruly contemporary condition is the absence of the state. Although he takes this locally oft-repeated claim seriously, he demonstrates that Urabá is more than a case of Hobbesian political disorder. Through his insightful exploration of war, paramilitary organizations, grassroots support and resistance, an...
Katarzyna Murawska-Muthesius, "Imaging and Mapping Eastern Europe: Imaging and Mapping Eastern Europe" (Routledge, 2021)
July 06, 2021 08:00 - 58 minutesImaging and Mapping Eastern Europe: Sarmatia Europea to Post-Communist Bloc (Routledge, 2021) puts images centre stage and argues for the agency of the visual in the construction of Europe's east as a socio-political and cultural entity. This book probes into the discontinuous processes of mapping the eastern European space and imaging the eastern European body. Beginning from the Renaissance maps of Sarmatia Europea, it moves onto the images of women in ethnic dress on the pages of traveller...
Andrew Davies, "Geographies of Anticolonialism: Political Networks Across and Beyond South India, c. 1900-1930" (John Wiley & Sons, 2020)
June 29, 2021 08:00 - 1 hourA fresh approach to scholarship on the diverse nature of Indian anticolonial processes, Geographies of Anticolonialism: Political Networks Across and Beyond South India, c. 1900-1930 (John Wiley & Sons, 2020) brings together a varied selection of literature to explore Indian anticolonialism in new ways and offers a different perspective to geographers seeking to understand political resistance to colonialism. It addresses contemporary studies that argue nationalism was joined by other politic...
Gavin Van Horn and John Hausdoerffer, "Wildness: Relations of People and Place" (U Chicago Press, 2017)
June 16, 2021 08:00 - 54 minutesWhether referring to a place, a nonhuman animal or plant, or a state of mind, wild indicates autonomy and agency, a unique expression of life. Yet two contrasting ideas about wild nature permeate contemporary discussions: either that nature is most wild in the absence of a defiling human presence, or that nature is completely humanized and nothing is truly wild. Wildness: Relations of People and Place (University of Chicago Press, 2017) charts a different path. Exploring how people can become...
Ryanne Pilgeram, "Pushed Out: Contested Development and Rural Gentrification in the US West" (U Washington Press, 2021)
June 09, 2021 08:00 - 46 minutesWhat happens to rural communities when their traditional economic base collapses? When new money comes in, who gets left behind? Pushed Out: Contested Development and Rural Gentrification in the US West (U Washington Press, 2021) offers a rich portrait of Dover, Idaho, whose transformation from "thriving timber mill town" to "economically depressed small town" to "trendy second-home location" over the past four decades embodies the story and challenges of many other rural communities. Sociolo...
Sven Saaler, "Men in Metal: A Topography of Public Bronze Statuary in Modern Japan" (Brill, 2020)
June 08, 2021 04:00 - 54 minutesIn his pioneering study, Men in Metal: A Topography of Public Bronze Statuary in Modern Japan (Brill, 2020), Sven Saaler examines Japanese public statuary as a central site of historical memory from its beginnings in the Meiji period through the twenty-first century. Saaler shows how the elites of the modern Japanese nation-state went about constructing an iconography of national heroes to serve their agenda of instilling national (and nationalist) thinking into the masses. Based on a wide r...
Jason H. Pearl, "Utopian Geographies and the Early English Novel" (U Virginia Press, 2014)
May 20, 2021 09:00 - 52 minutesHistorians of the Enlightenment have studied the period’s substantial advances in world cartography, as well as the decline of utopia imagined in geographic terms. Literary critics, meanwhile, have assessed the emerging novel’s realism and in particular the genre’s awareness of the wider world beyond Europe. Jason Pearl unites these lines of inquiry in Utopian Geographies and the Early English Novel (University of Virginia Press, 2014),arguing that prose fiction from 1660 to 1740 helped demys...