New Books in Politics and Polemics
1,180 episodes - English - Latest episode: 4 months ago - ★★★★★ - 4 ratingsInterviews with Authors of Politics and Polemics about their New Books
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Episodes
The Adversity of Diversity: A Conversation with Carol Swain
December 12, 2023 09:00 - 41 minutesToday, we have a BONUS episode of Madison's Notes: the Madison Program's Executive Director Dr. Shilo Brooks sits down with Dr. Carol Swain to talk about her incredible journey from a childhood in poverty to a career as a prominent political and legal scholar, as well as her new book The Adversity of Diversity: How the Supreme Court's Decision to Remove Race from College Admissions Criteria Will Doom Diversity Programs (Be People Books, 2023). Dr. Carol Swain obtained early tenure at Princet...
Ruth Ben-Ghiat on Threats to Democracy and H.L. Mencken’s "Notes on Democracy"
December 09, 2023 09:00 - 57 minutesA century ago, journalist H. L. Mencken provocatively stated in Notes On Democracy (new edition by Warbler Press, 2023) that anti-democratic behavior is not only not shocking but that we should in fact expect democracies to give rise to un- and even anti-democratic forces. Mencken doubted that such the evils of democracy will be cured by more democracy, which usually means elections and ‘fostering democratic norms and behaviors. So what is to be done? I spoke with NYU Professor and political ...
James A. Chamberlain, "Undoing Work, Rethinking Community: A Critique of the Social Function of Work" (ILR Press, 2018)
December 06, 2023 09:00 - 45 minutesThis revolutionary book presents a new conception of community and the struggle against capitalism. In Undoing Work, Rethinking Community: A Critique of the Social Function of Work (ILR Press, 2018), James A. Chamberlain argues that paid work and the civic duty to perform it substantially undermines freedom and justice. Chamberlain believes that to seize back our time and transform our society, we must abandon the deep-seated view that community is constructed by work, whether paid or not. Ch...
Speak Out: 'Unwoke' with Senator Ted Cruz
December 05, 2023 09:00 - 20 minutesHow do we defeat woke ideology and the threat it poses to free speech? Senator Ted Cruz '92 joins Madison's Notes to discuss his latest book, Unwoke: How to Defeat Cultural Marxism in America (Regnery Publishing, 2023). Here, Ted discusses how universities, businesses, and other organs of cultural and political life cause woke ideology, what can conservatives do, and some Ted's favorite memories at Princeton studying under the Madison Program's Director, Professor Robert P. George. In additio...
The Future of the State: A Discussion with Graeme Garrard
December 04, 2023 09:00 - 38 minutesThe Reagan-Thatcher neoliberal era started the retreat of the state. Privatisation and deregulation meant power was handed over to corporations and markets. Now that neoliberalism has run its course, will there be a return of the state? Listen to Owen Bennett Jones in conversation Graeme Garrard. Garrard is the author of The Return of the State: And Why It Is Essential for Our Health, Wealth and Happiness (Yale UP, 2022). Owen Bennett-Jones is a freelance journalist and writer. A former BBC c...
Deepak Bhargava and Stephanie Luce, "Practical Radicals: Seven Strategies to Change the World" (The New Press, 2023)
December 01, 2023 09:00 - 33 minutesIn the tradition of Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals and Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, Deepak Bhargava and Stephanie Luce’s Practical Radicals: Seven Strategies to Change the World (The New Press, 2023) offers winning strategies, history, and theory for a new generation of activists. Based on interviews with leading organizers, this groundbreaking book describes seven strategies to bring about transformative change. It incorporates stories of organizations and movements that have won, including ...
Vid Simoniti, "Artists Remake the World: A Contemporary Art Manifesto" (Yale UP, 2023)
November 29, 2023 09:00 - 58 minutesArtists Remake the World: A Contemporary Art Manifesto (Yale UP, 2023) puts forward an account of contemporary art’s political ambitions and potential. Surveying such innovations as evidence-driven art, socially engaged art, and ecological art, the book explores how artists have attempted to offer bold solutions to the world’s problems. Simoniti systematises the perspectives of contemporary art as a force for political and social change. At its best, he argues, contemporary art allows us to i...
Astra Taylor, "The Age of Insecurity: Coming Together as Things Fall Apart" (House of Anansi Press, 2023)
November 28, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourThese days, everyone feels insecure. We are financially stressed and emotionally overwhelmed. The status quo isn’t working for anyone, even those who appear to have it all. What is going on? In The Age of Insecurity (House of Anansi Press, 2023), author and activist Astra Taylor exposes how seemingly disparate crises—rising inequality and declining mental health, the ecological emergency, and the threat of authoritarianism—originate from a social order built on insecurity. From home ownership...
Samuel Clowes Huneke, "A Queer Theory of the State" (Floating Opera Press, 2023)
November 27, 2023 09:00 - 39 minutesQueer theory has often been hesitant to align itself with a politics of the state, approaching it with a negative or pragmatic framework. A Queer Theory of the State (Floating Opera Press, 2023) expands an earlier online essay from The Point by historian Samuel Huneke to offer a more optimistic perspective. Rather than eschew political engagement with democratic theorizing, Huneke asks how queer theory can wed its critically anti-normative impulses to the empirical need for a state. In answer...
Jeremy Black, "A Brief History of History" (Indiana UP, 2023)
November 25, 2023 09:00 - 29 minutesIn A Brief History of History (Indiana UP, 2023), acclaimed historian Jeremy Black seeks to reinvigorate and redefine our ideas about history. The stories we tell about the past are a crucial aspect of all cultures. However, while the traditional storytelling process—what we think of as "history" in the proper sense—is useful, it is also misleading, not least because it leads to the repetition of bias and misinformation. Black suggests that the conventional idea of history and historians is c...
Israel, Hamas, and American Jews in a Time of War
November 22, 2023 09:00 - 37 minutesOn today’s episode of International Horizons, RBI director John Torpey speaks with Jodi Rudoren, editor-in-chief of the Forward magazine, about the situation in Israel and Gaza. She notes that Hamas’s incursion into Israel on October 7, 2023, shattered the paradigm of how Israel and even the Arab world understood what Hamas was all about. The result has been a deep sense of shock and mourning among Israelis for those who have lost loved ones or had them taken hostage. At the same time, some J...
Leonard Grob and John K. Roth, "Warnings: The Holocaust, Ukraine, and Endangered American Democracy" (Cascade Books, 2023)
November 20, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourOld friends--one a Jew, the other a Christian--Leonard (Lenny) Grob and John K. Roth are philosophers who have long studied the Holocaust. That experience makes us anxious about democracy, because we are also Americans living in perilous times. The 2020s remind us of the 1930s when Nazis destroyed democracy in Germany. Carnage followed. In the 2020s, Donald Trump and his followers endanger democracy in the United States. With Vladimir Putin's ruthless assault against Ukraine compounding the d...
Chris Cutrone, "The Death of the Millennial Left: Interventions: 2006-2022" (Sublation Media, 2023)
November 19, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourIn The Death of the Millennial Left: Interventions: 2006-2022 (Sublation Media, 2023), Chris Cutrone investigates how and why the Millennial Left did not take up the task of socialism for the their time and relegated themselves to the shadows of the GenX Left and the New Left before them. The Millennial Left, facing the War on Terror, the Great Recession, the Arab Spring and the Occupy movement, and the Black Lives Matter protests, as well as the Presidencies of Obama and Trump and the politi...
Robert P. George's 'Making Men Moral': A 30th Anniversary Conference
November 18, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourThe first book in the storied career of one of the most influential conservative legal scholars and philosophers of our day is the focus of an upcoming conference in Washington, DC. Making Men Moral (1993) is the book and Robert P. George is the man behind it—Princeton professor of jurisprudence, bioethicist and pro-life and civil liberties champion. Scheduled speakers include some of the most important thinkers on social conservatism and legal thought of the generations he has molded, plus m...
Plantationocene
November 17, 2023 09:00 - 18 minutesIn this episode of High Theory, Neil Safier talks with us about the Plantationocene, a geological epoch that traces the effects of climate change to the historical systems of human and nonhuman environmental exploitation known as plantation agriculture. It is another name for the world we currently inhabit. In the episode, Neil describes how Donna Harraway and Anna Tsing invented the term Plantationocene in response to another recent term Anthropocene. Sources to check out include Donna Haraw...
Where Have All the Democrats Gone?
November 16, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourIn 2002, John B. Judis and Ruy Teixeira published The Emerging Democratic Majority (Scribner). Now the pair are back with Where Have All the Democrats Gone?: The Soul of the Party in the Age of Extremes (Henry Holt, 2023). In their new book, an essential guide to the trends that roil the Democratic Party and threaten its national standing, the authors forthrightly acknowledge that they had underestimated “the defection of the white working class” from party ranks. Our conversation focuses on ...
Martin Jay, "Immanent Critiques: The Frankfurt School under Pressure" (Verso, 2023)
November 15, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourThe Frankfurt School’s own legacy is best preserved by exercising an immanent critique of its premises and the conclusions to which they often led. By distinguishing between what is still and what is no longer alive in Critical Theory, Immanent Critiques: The Frankfurt School Under Pressure (Verso, 2023) seeks to demonstrate its continuing relevance in the 21st century. Fifty years after the appearance of The Dialectical Imagination, his pioneering history of the Frankfurt School, Martin Jay ...
Elizabeth Anderson, "Hijacked: How Neoliberalism Turned the Work Ethic against Workers and How Workers Can Take It Back" (Cambridge UP, 2023)
November 13, 2023 09:00 - 56 minutesWhat is the work ethic? Does it justify policies that promote the wealth and power of the One Percent at workers' expense? Or does it advance policies that promote workers' dignity and standing? Hijacked: How Neoliberalism Turned the Work Ethic against Workers and How Workers Can Take It Back (Cambridge UP, 2023) explores how the history of political economy has been a contest between these two ideas about whom the work ethic is supposed to serve. Today's neoliberal ideology deploys the work ...
Juliet Hooker, "Black Grief/White Grievance: The Politics of Loss" (Princeton UP, 2023)
November 13, 2023 09:00 - 57 minutesIn democracies, citizens must accept loss; we can't always be on the winning side. But in the United States, the fundamental civic capacity of being able to lose is not distributed equally. Propped up by white supremacy, whites (as a group) are accustomed to winning; they have generally been able to exercise political rule without having to accept sharing it. Black citizens, on the other hand, are expected to be political heroes whose civic suffering enables progress toward racial justice. I...
Clive Young, "Unlocking Scots: The Secret Life of the Scots Language" (Luath Press, 2023)
November 12, 2023 09:00 - 54 minutesIn Unlocking Scots: The Secret Life of the Scots Language (Luath, 2023), Dr. Clive Young sets out to uncover the secret life of Scots – the centuries of vibrant debate and unconscious bilingualism hidden beneath slang and touristy tea-towels. From 19th-century dictionaries to Twitter rammies, Dr. Young explores the evolution, suppression, and potential revitalisation of Scots. He not only investigates its troubled past, but also looks towards the future with hope and a practical action plan t...
Steven Simon, "Grand Delusion: The Rise and Fall of American Ambition in the Middle East" (Penguin, 2023)
November 11, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourA longtime American foreign policy insider’s penetrating and definitive reckoning with this country’s involvement in the Middle East The culmination of almost forty years at the highest levels of policymaking and scholarship, Grand Delusion: The Rise and Fall of American Ambition in the Middle East (Penguin, 2023) is Steven Simon’s tour de force, offering a comprehensive and deeply informed account of U.S. engagement in the Middle East. Simon begins with the Reagan administration, when Americ...
Caroline Levine, "The Activist Humanist: Form and Method in the Climate Crisis" (Princeton UP, 2023)
November 09, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourW. H. Auden once said, “Poetry makes nothing happen.” Auden’s quote has been used for so many purposes, it might be worth remembering what he meant. Auden’s line is importantly from a poem memorializing W.B. Yeats, a politician and a poet. Auden meant that despite Yeats’s poetry, “Ireland [still] has her madness and her weather still.” Yeats’s poetry didn’t stop suffering. But Auden acknowledges that poetry is a “way of happening” that survives and persists. Today’s guest, Caroline Levine, ha...
Kathleen Mcphillips and Naomi Goldenberg, "The End of Religion: Feminist Reappraisals of the State" (Routledge, 2020)
November 08, 2023 09:00 - 45 minutesFeminist theory has enhanced and expanded the agency, influence, status and contributions of women throughout the globe. However, feminist critical analysis has not yet examined how the assumption that religion is natural, timeless, universal and omnipresent supports sexist and race-based oppression. Kathleen Mcphillips and Naomi Goldenberg edited volume The End of Religion: Feminist Reappraisals of the State (Routledge, 2020) proposes radical new thinking about religion in order to better c...
Speak Freely: The Princeton Principles
November 07, 2023 09:00 - 59 minutesKicking off our new monthly series on freedom of speech, Keith Whittington and Donald Downs discuss the Princeton Principles for a Campus of Free Inquiry. These principles, outlined by a group of scholars convened by Professor Robert P. George here at the James Madison Program in March 2023, expand on the well-known Chicago Principles in ensuring campus free speech and institutional neutrality. Professors Whittington and Downs are both among the original fifteen participants and endorsers of ...
Alexandra Hudson, "The Soul of Civility: Timeless Principles to Heal Society and Ourselves" (St. Martin's Press, 2023)
November 02, 2023 08:00 - 33 minutesAlexandra Hudson, daughter of the "Manners Lady," was raised to respect others. But as she grew up, Hudson discovered a difference between politeness--a superficial appearance of good manners--and true civility. In this timely book, Hudson sheds light on how civility can help bridge our political divide. From classical philosophers like Epictetus, to great twentieth-century thinkers like Martin Luther King Jr., to her own experience working in the federal government during one of the most pol...
The Future of Cancelling: A Conversation with Greg Lukianoff
November 01, 2023 08:00 - 39 minutesCancel culture is something all academics are aware of and some are concerned about. Certainly that’s true of Greg Lukianoff who was the co-author (with Jonathan Haidt) of The Coddling of the American Mind (Penguin, 2018) and who has now co-authored (with Rikki Schlott) of The Canceling of the American Mind (Simon and Schuster, 2023). Listen to him in conversation with Owen Bennett Jones. Owen Bennett-Jones is a freelance journalist and writer. A former BBC correspondent and presenter he has...
Frederick V. Engram, "Black Liberation Through Action and Resistance: MOVE" (Rowman & Littlefield, 2023)
October 30, 2023 08:00 - 38 minutesBlack Liberation through Action and Resistance: MOVE (Rowman & Littlefield, 2023) serves as a call to action for Black millennials and co-conspirators who are immersed in the work of Black liberation or want to begin their own journey toward anti-racism. Its central mission is to provide additional context to an ongoing discussion regarding Black liberation and proper allyship. The theory behind MOVE challenges anti-Blackness, patriarchy, white supremacy, and misogynoir ideologies aimed at th...
Norman Solomon, "War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine" (New Press, 2023)
October 28, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourMore than twenty years ago, 9/11 and the war in Afghanistan set into motion a hugely consequential shift in America’s foreign policy: a perpetual state of war that is almost entirely invisible to the American public. War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine (New Press, 2023), by the journalist and political analyst Norman Solomon, exposes how this happened, and what its consequences are, from military and civilian casualties to drained resources at home. Fr...
Nick Riemer, "Boycott Theory and the Struggle for Palestine: Universities, Intellectualism and Liberation" (Rowman & Littlefield, 2022)
October 27, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourThe academic boycott of Israel, a branch of the pro-Palestinian Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign, is one of the richest—and most divisive—topics in the politics of knowledge today. In Boycott Theory and the Struggle for Palestine: Universities, Intellectualism and Liberation (Rowman & Littlefield, 2022), Nick Riemer addresses the most fundamental questions raised by the call to sever ties with Israeli universities, and offers fresh arguments for doing so. More than a narrow st...
Nicole Nguyen, "Terrorism on Trial: Political Violence and Abolitionist Futures" (U Minnesota Press, 2023)
October 27, 2023 08:00 - 55 minutesRather than functioning as a final arbiter of justice, U.S. domestic courts are increasingly seen as counterterrorism tools that can incapacitate terrorists, maintain national security operations domestically, and produce certain narratives of conflict. Terrorism on Trial: Political Violence and Abolitionist Futures (University of Minnesota Press, 2023) by Dr. Nicole Nguyen examines the contemporary role that these courts play in the global war on terror and their use as a weapon of war: hunt...
Denise D. Meringolo, "Radical Roots: Public History and a Tradition of Social Justice Activism" (Amherst College Press, 2021)
October 26, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourUncovering a radical tradition at the heart of public history within the United States, Radical Roots: Public History and a Tradition of Social Justice Activism (Amherst College Press, 2021) redefines our sense of the past and future of public historical practice. Its editor, Denise D. Meringolo proposes an alternative and more radical understanding of public history’s beginnings that has been marginalized in prior studies of the past of the historian profession. Reflecting on this radical pa...
Jeff Kosseff, "Liar in a Crowded Theater: Freedom of Speech in a World of Misinformation" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2023)
October 24, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourThanks to the First Amendment, Americans enjoy a rare privilege: the constitutional right to lie. And although controversial, they should continue to enjoy this right. When commentators and politicians discuss misinformation, they often repeat five words: "fire in a crowded theater." Though governments can, if they choose, attempt to ban harmful lies, propaganda, misinformation, and disinformation, how effective will their efforts really be? Can they punish someone for yelling "fire" in a cro...
Decolonizing Praxis
October 23, 2023 08:00 - 23 minutesIn this episode of High Theory, Erin Pineda talks about decolonizing praxis. Black American activists in the 1950s and 1960s used strategies of civil disobedience and nonviolent direct action as part of a broader anticolonial movement, and reading their story in an international context can help us rethink the narrative of the US civil rights movement enshrined in American political theory. In the episode Erin references Jack Halberstam’s concept of “low theory” which derives from the work of...
Jason C. Bivins, "Embattled America: The Rise of Anti-Politics and America's Obsession with Religion" (Oxford UP, 2022)
October 21, 2023 08:00 - 35 minutesHistories of political religion since the 1960s often center on the rise of the powerful conservative evangelical voting bloc since the 1970s. One of the beliefs that has united these citizens is the idea that they are treated unfairly or are marginalized, despite their significant influence on public life. From the ascent of Reagan to the "Contract with America," from 9/11 to Obama to Trump--these claims have moved steadily to the center of conservative activism. Scholars of religion have ap...
The Radical Imagination in Reactionary Times
October 21, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourProfessors Alex Khasnabish and Max Haiven are authors of a book called The Radical Imagination: Social Movement Research in the Age of Austerity (Bloomsbury, 2014). Their book examines how social movements imagine (and build) radical new futures. Additionally, the book critically intervenes in broader social movement theory, and suggests new approaches for scholar-activists. As part of a recent episode of Darts and Letters, “Mutual Aid & the Anarchist Radical Imagination,” we spoke to Alex an...
Diana Furchtgott-Roth on Serving In Four U.S. Presidential Administrations, Environmental Regulation, and Infrastructure
October 21, 2023 07:55 - 59 minutesDiana Furchtgott-Roth (Heritage Fellow and GWU Adjunct Professor) joins the podcast to discuss her career including her government service in the Reagan, George H.W. Bush, George W. Bush and Trump administrations, along with her current work on environmental regulation and infrastructure. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/politics-and-polemics
Alexandre Baril, "Undoing Suicidism: A Trans, Queer, Crip Approach to Rethinking (Assisted) Suicide" (Temple UP, 2023)
October 20, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourNote: This episode contains a discussion of suicide. A list of resources is available below. In Undoing Suicidism: A Trans, Queer, Crip Approach to Rethinking (Assisted) Suicide (Temple UP, 2023), Alexandre Baril argues that suicidal people are oppressed by what he calls structural suicidism, a hidden oppression that, until now, has been unnamed and under-theorized. Each year, suicidism and its preventionist script and strategies reproduce violence and cause additional harm and death among s...
TCJA, the CARES Act, inflation, and the debt limit
October 19, 2023 13:46 - 1 hourKevin Hassett (Former CEA Chairman and Hoover Institution Distinguished Fellow) joins the podcast to discuss his career, the legacy of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA), including corporate tax reform and opportunity zones, the Trump administration's response to COVID-19 in the CARES Act, inflation, and the ongoing debt limit standoff. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/politics...
Orisanmi Burton, "Tip of the Spear: Black Radicalism, Prison Repression, and the Long Attica Revolt" (U California Press, 2023)
October 17, 2023 08:00 - 52 minutesTip of the Spear: Black Radicalism, Prison Repression, and the Long Attica Revolt (University of California Press, 2023) boldly and compellingly argues that prisons are a domain of hidden warfare within US borders. With this book, Orisanmi Burton explores what he terms the Long Attica Revolt, a criminalized tradition of Black radicalism that propelled rebellions in New York prisons during the 1970s. The reaction to this revolt illuminates what Burton calls prison pacification: the coordinated...
Tom Gallagher, "Europe's Leadership Famine: Portraits of Defiance and Decay 1950-2022" (Scotview, 2023)
October 16, 2023 08:00 - 50 minutesToday I talked to Tom Gallagher about his new book Europe's Leadership Famine: Portraits of Defiance and Decay 1950-2022 (Scotview, 2023). Representative democracy endured in Europe because its political leaders’ deviousness and self-advancement were balanced by altruism, fortitude and civic virtue. However, in this century, the reputation and calibre of politicians has slumped in country after country, as fads, image, process, triviality and spin are promoted over experience, prudence and lo...
Lainey Newman and Theda Skocpol, "Rust Belt Union Blues: Why Working-Class Voters Are Turning Away from the Democratic Party" (Columbia UP, 2023)
October 12, 2023 08:00 - 40 minutesIn the heyday of American labor, the influence of local unions extended far beyond the workplace. Unions fostered tight-knit communities, touching nearly every aspect of the lives of members--mostly men--and their families and neighbors. They conveyed fundamental worldviews, making blue-collar unionists into loyal Democrats who saw the party as on the side of the working man. Today, unions play a much less significant role in American life. In industrial and formerly industrial Rust Belt town...
Mutual Aid and the Anarchist Radical Imagination
October 11, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourThis episode of Darts and Letters examines the theory and practice of anti-statist organizing. There’s a story you can tell about the post-Occupy left gravitating towards a more state-oriented kind of politics, exemplified by the enthusiasm around Bernie Sanders, The Squad, and others. However, this misses autonomous and anarchist-inflected (and sometimes, explicitly anarchist) social movements that have brought enormous energy, and enormous change–from the movement for black lives, to organi...
Gültan Kışanak, "The Purple Color of Kurdish Politics: Women Politicians Write from Prison" (Pluto Press, 2022)
October 10, 2023 08:00 - 53 minutesThe Purple Color of Kurdish Politics: Women Politicians Write from Prison (Pluto Press, 2022) is a one-of-a-kind collection of prison writings from more than 20 Kurdish women politicians. Here they reflect on their personal and collective struggles against patriarchy and anti-Kurdish repression in Turkey; on the radical feminist principles and practices through which they transformed the political structures and state offices in which they operated. They discuss what worked and what didn't, a...
Aurelian Craiutu, "Why Not Moderation?: Letters to Young Radicals" (Cambridge UP, 2023)
October 09, 2023 08:00 - 33 minutesModeration is often presented as a simple virtue for lukewarm and indecisive minds, searching for a fuzzy center between the extremes. Not surprisingly, many politicians do not want to be labelled 'moderates' for fear of losing elections. Why Not Moderation?: Letters to Young Radicals (Cambridge UP, 2023) challenges this conventional image and shows that moderation is a complex virtue with a rich tradition and unexplored radical sides. Through a series of imaginary letters between a passionat...
Kendra Coulter, "Defending Animals: Finding Hope on the Front Lines of Animal Protection" (MIT Press, 2023)
October 08, 2023 08:00 - 59 minutesBeloved dogs and cats. Magnificent horses and mountain gorillas. Curious chickens. What do we actually do to protect animals from harm—and is it enough? This engaging book provides a unique and eye-opening exploration of the world of animal protection as people defend diverse animals from injustice and cruelty. From the streets of major US cities to remote farms and tropical forests, Defending Animals: Finding Hope on the Front Lines of Animal Protection (MIT Press, 2023) is a gritty and movi...
Stephenie Foster and Susan A. Markham, "Feminist Foreign Policy in Theory and in Practice" (Routledge, 2023)
October 07, 2023 08:00 - 34 minutesIn 2014, Sweden announced the world’s first “feminist foreign policy,” an approach more than two dozen other nations have since adopted. But different national approaches and a range of theoretical frameworks complicate definitions of what feminist foreign policy should or could be. With Feminist Foreign Policy in Theory and in Practice: An Introduction (Routledge 2023), Stephenie Foster and Susan Markham offer an accessible overview of the main tenets of a feminist foreign policy, and how su...
S. D. Chrostowska, "Utopia in the Age of Survival: Between Myth and Politics" (Stanford UP, 2021)
October 06, 2023 08:00 - 56 minutesA pathbreaking exploration of the fate of utopia in our troubled times, this book shows how the historically intertwined endeavors of utopia and critique might be leveraged in response to humanity's looming existential challenges. Utopia in the Age of Survival: Between Myth and Politics (Stanford UP, 2021) makes the case that critical social theory needs to reinstate utopia as a speculative myth. At the same time the left must reassume utopia as an action-guiding hypothesis—that is, as someth...
James N. Druckman and Elizabeth A. Sharrow, "Equality Unfulfilled: How Title IX's Policy Design Undermines Change to College Sports" (Cambridge UP, 2023)
October 05, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourThe year 1972 is often hailed as an inflection point in the evolution of women's rights. Congress passed Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, a law that outlawed sex-based discrimination in education. Many Americans celebrate Title IX for having ushered in an era of expanded opportunity for women's athletics; yet fifty years after its passage, sex-based inequalities in college athletics remain the reality. James N. Druckman and Elizabeth A. Sharrow's book Equality Unfulfilled: How Ti...
Ronna Detrick, "Rewriting Eve: Claiming Women's Sacred Stories As Our Own" (She Writes Press, 2023)
October 03, 2023 08:00 - 53 minutesIn Rewriting Eve: Rescuing Women’s Stories from the Bible and Reclaiming Them as Our Own (She Writes Press, 2023), Ronna Detrick invites us into the presence and power of ten sacred, biblical women, revealing the endlessly relevant ways in which they speak today and showing how they can heal, embolden, and transform our stories. Trapped in patriarchy and theological argument, dismissed as irrelevant, or viewed as unchangeable even as times change, these women’s voices, desires, and hearts hav...
Emily McTernan, "On Taking Offence" (Oxford UP, 2023)
October 01, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourA lot of work in moral, political, and legal theory aims to define the offensive. Surprisingly, relatively little attention has been paid to the affectively intoned practice of taking offense. One consequence of this inattention is that discussion of offense-taking usually occurs within the context of popular culture critique, where many commentators lament that people today are too easily offended or take offence at too many things. The prevailing thought is that taking offence is usually mo...